Slashdot Mirror
IBM Pushing Water-Cooled Servers, Meeting Resistance
judgecorp writes "IBM has said that water-cooled servers could become the norm in ten years. The company has lately been promoting wider user of the forty-year-old mainframe technology (e.g., here's a piece from April 2008), which allows faster clock speeds and higher processing power. But IBM now says water cooling is greener and more efficient, because it delivers waste heat in a form that's easier to re-use. They estimate that water can be up to 4,000 times more effective in cooling computer systems than air. However, most new data center designs tend to take the opposite approach, running warmer, and using free-air cooling to expend less energy in the first place. For instance, Dutch engineer Imtech sees no need for water cooling in its new multi-story approach which reduces piping and saves waste."
These kind of predictions always remind me of Bill Gates asserting that "640 K should be enough for anybody."
Hardware and software faces change so fast; who has any idea what will be required or available in even ten years?
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
The community in which a server farms is found surely has a need for what will be thousands of gallons a day. To the benefit of all, I'd suggest diverting a small amount of the heated water (hopefully near boiling) to another piping system in the building .... which would be routed to a building-wide coffee or espresso maker. Great for the employees and with an outside tap, the community can get free coffee to boot. If anyone from Greenpeace shows up to protest about the water wastage, avoid telling them about the coffee maker - it'll keep them up longer to protest.
Seems like if one system goes bad, they have to shut down the whole array because of the water process? I guess when people complain about not having hot water, they won't call their utilities anymore, it would be the datacenter.
I had a Japanese car that used to blow A/C down there. It was great; balls are on the outside of the body because they don't like body heat. Maybe Japan sells special water-cooled underwear. After all, they specialize in high-tech toiletries. (Just hope it doesn't spring a leak during a presentation.)
Table-ized A.I.
I attach the power cable and the network cord to my laptop. :)
So, will I, now, need to connect a water pipe carrying cold water too?
I wouldn't mind it if I can get my drink of water from it too
The best planning can be done after the project completes.
look at some of the newer blades or blade-ish solutions from supermicro, with 4 dual-socket boards in 2u. Dang near half the space is now taken up by ram slots. Suppose they switched to sodimms packed in like heatsink fins on one of those boards, and you could possibly cram in 2 more sockets with waterblocks.
Similar re-arrangement with blade boards would likely also be possible.
In a dedicated datacenter, I can't think of any real great money saving solutions for the waste heat, but it WOULD allow you to more easily cool everything with a large ground loop to get 50-55 degree water. Add a few more loops so you can melt the snow off the parking lot in the winter and bleed off heat there. Add a large tank of water and radiators to take advantage of cool nights to pre-cool the water before the chillers.
Only chill the water with the chillers when needed. Seems to make a lot of sense to me.
In smaller serverrooms in large office buildings, pre-heat the hot water, pipe the hot water to help heat the building in the winter, and depending on location and if its a mixed use building, you MIGHT be able to sell some of the heat to other building tenants.
Personally, if I was building a new house, I'd have ground loop heat pump for cooling, heating, put a decent sized water tank on the top floor/attic that I could use to preheat hot water in the winter (also be good to hook into for solar hot water on the roof) and a water tank in the basement/crawl space as a source for cooling. Add some electronics to determine where to draw water source, and where to push water return for different devices depending on temperatures of each given tank, as well as when to run ground source heat pump or outside radiator and I think I could cut heating/cooling costs by a huge margin.
Now if only we had a good way to pipe the light from all the blinking LED's to where its needed to remove the ugly florescent lighting. That or get everyone to work by the glow of their CRT/LCD
If they meet resistance, can't they just add some salt to the water?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Some tanks have air conditioning.
Air conditioning the whole tank does not make sense because once you fire the cannon a few times the whole place is very hot.
What they do is have a hose that hooks up to the special overall tankers wear and supplies you with cool air where you need it most.
The hose connector is at the center of the suit.
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
I worked in several banks using IBM mainframes. The server room was always like a freezer.
I think for now, many companies are perfectly ok with air cooling solutions. Besides, it's much safer to have air-conditioning and fans than some liquid flowing. The simpler the system, the less accidents occur within it...
And believe me when I say that, if a company owns an IBM mainframe, they pay big bucks and they *don't* want any accidents.
I remember that IBM had an office building in Manassas, VA that was heated by the mainframes in the building. They got a lot of press at the time for that.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Try to keep up IBM. I built my computers years ago. I built a server/workstation 2 PC combo in a rack unit and used watercooling to cool both computers. In a server farm situation it makes sense too. You can recycle your water and I think it would be cheaper to cool water than air. Am I right?
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
We could save a lot of money by putting all that light-bulb heat to use.. to bad entropy makes these sorts of schemes uneconomical.
From the article: "We can use that to heat offices, or water for a swimming pool". Job Ad: "Wanted: Sysadmin, we offer: all year heated office (20+ C), swimming pool, Jacuzzi (body temperature) integrated coffe mug wamer in tabletop and always a nice, warm breeze from our datacenter." IBM could even use the swimming pool as a cooling tank (or is it the other way round?).
Where do people always get these kinds of numbers. I dare to guess that in reality it's not even 2 times more effective :p
All IBM is saying is that water is a better heat conductor, and air is an insulator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_heat_capacity
Water ; 4 J /cm^3 K /cm^3 K
Air ; 0.001 J
Water/Air = 4000 times more heat transfer.
So, given the choice, you would use water to transfer heat.
This is why nowadays virtually all internal combustion engines of any power output use liquid cooling despite the apparent reliability benefits of air cooling. To take the transition period, WW2, as an example, you only have to look at the complexity of American rotary aircooled designs versus, say, the liquid cooled Merlin engine, to see the point. It would be astonishing if the same transition did not eventually occur for large computers.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The Lindt & Sprungli chocolate factory in Zurich, Switzerland uses waste heat from the factory to heat a public swimming pool across the road.
Sounds like a tall tale to me.
At the bottom of the
This reminds me of recycling schemes that make people think it is OK to overpackage goods in the first place.
Try replacing the copper pipes with gold ones, that should make the current flow more easily.
I expect integrated power-and-watercooling sockets all over the house. The forced flow, the air conditioning unit integrated with water cooling facility, pump and reservoir, also using the heated water as heat source for heat pump.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I worked for IBM in the 80's for a little while. One site I visited sold the waste heat from their seven (water-cooled) mainframes to a nearby housing estate. There was also a story the sales guys likes to tell about Amdahl (a major rival) and their air-cooled mainframes.
So the Amdahl engineers had installed the new machine in its shiny new machine room, threaded all the cables under the false floor, hooked up the disk drives etc. and started commissioning it. All went well for a few hours then CRASH.
Turned out the disk drive cables had come loose from the underside of the CPU. OK, plug them back in, tighten all the screws, put the flooring back down, start again. Few hours later the same thing, with added stripped screws on the plug (think of a VGA plug magnified about 3 times in each direction).
Transpired that the nw false floor was a bit too shiny and the cooling air exhaust from the CPU (a box maybe 6 feet long, 2 wide and 5 high, weighing a ton or two) was slowly sliding it across the room by jet propulsion.
A couple of summers later I worked for a civil service site. They had two IBM mainframes and two Crays, but vented all the heat (and that from the nuclear reactors) into the surrounding air. Meanwhile the site was heated by an ancient coal boiler several miles away and leaky steam pipes!
Steve
For those who are in a position to design their own building with this sort of thing in mind, then yes, there may be ways to just design the building to get a better cooling environment. That is not always possible or practical though. Using a liquid cooling solution may very well be the future, but the real key is to make sure the cooling systems require as little attention as possible, and the amount of maintenance for cooling is fairly low.
Think about it, if you run your systems off-site, the last thing you want would be to have to fly someone to the site just to maintain the cooling system if it is unusual. It really depends on the design, and how long the liquid cooling system within a computer can go without maintenance. Most air cooled systems can go for upwards of five years without a fan going bad.
sounds like the Tubes are blocked - bring out the descalers!
...that insists pushing bigger clock speeds. I fully expect IBM to promote liquid Nitrogen cooling in another couple years.
The thermal energy that can be utilized from harnessing waste heat from the server farm is proportional to the the temperature of the heated fluid.
It is true that water is a better medium for storing and transferring heat, but if the goal is to be able to run the servers cooler, then that lower temperature is the maximum temperature they will be able to heat the water to.
Plus, it also boils down to fixed costs. Is it much more expensive to install large heat exchangers that would transfer the heat from cooling air to water (allowing it to reach higher temperatures) than to install the water cooling system in each server?
Until the desire for efficient power use outweighs the desire (or even need) for faster, more powerful data centers, there will always be a need for cooling systems. When it gets to a point where people want efficiency (or need efficiency), then you'll see data centers that don't require as much power.
You can't realistically develop towards maximizing efficiency AND power. At a certain point, you have to sacrifice a little bit of one for the other. To maximize both would require too much time in development and you'll fall behind in the competition. Being one generation (or more) will kill most, though the efficiency niche market will still hold you up, just not all that well.
Then learn how to capture the waste heat from a datacenter. In the cooling field, there is a wide range of ways to provide very efficient cooling - all the way down to putting 'em in a tent and just letting the wind blow through (a PUE of 1 - more realistically, a PUE of 1.3-1.1 is easily doable if your mechanical is up to par.) BUT, we are just fighting to throw away all that energy. Does Dean Kamen have a sterling engine for us yet that be hooked up to a generator to recover some of that usable heat? I can give him 10MW at a 40 - 60F temperature delta 8760 hours a year if he can just give me the engine...
Geothermal heat pumps use the ground as a heat sink, usually letting electric powered circulation pumps and compressors move 4-5x as much heat energy as electric power consumed when water (or a fluid like antifreeze) is the circulating medium. Generally they sink heat in the ground, which has only so much capacity (room heating/cooling apps get the heat back in the colder weather). But they could transfer the heat to sewage water that flows out of buildings, taking heat with it. Such a system could be 4-5x as efficient as air fans cooling computers.
I think that the computer industry would be a great mass market for this technology. Which would probably see dramatic improvement, as computer engineers are some of the most effective in innovating for efficiency. Someday we might see water circuits at power outlets for all kinds of appliances, not just computers in data centers.
--
make install -not war
IBM not only put in a cup holder, now their PCs make hot water for your coffee too!
Liebert has their XD system where you have pipes distributed around the data centre just like power, and you tap into it. You can either buy a system that uses water or refrigerant.
Sun sells rack doors that attach to this system, and can cool up to 35 kW per rack:
http://www.sun.com/servers/cooling/
You don't have to make any changes to the server design.
So a company that provides air cooling solutions to data-center design believes air cooling is the way to go? Who would have thought!
Data center cooling requirements vary wildly. In some cases water cooling may be the correct answer. In others air cooling may be the correct answer. You will almost certainly continue to see both solutions for quite a while.
You are correct, but both radial and rotary engines are complex beasts. I think too that if you look into aircraft engines you will find that the way they made many air cooled engines light and powerful was basically by wasting fuel - the heat removed from the cylinder head by fuel evaporation was significant, and the specific output was terrible. Liquid cooled engines can use high super- and turbocharge while still being quite thermally efficient. And, as someone has noted above, modern motorcycle engines are normally liquid cooled - even when they have fake fins on the cylinders to look pretty!
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The idea of using water cooling and then re-using the stored heat energy by redirecting it to an area that is heat-deficient is sound, green, and all that, at least in principle. The objections, if there are any, would come from the implementation. Since that is unique to each circumstance, the right answer is "it depends", but most certainly not "that's crazy talk" or "everyone should be doing this".
If we're talking about efficiency, then I'm not sure where to start ... getting more work out of a processor via superior cooling also means getting more power into the CPU and other stuff around it. It is the waste power we need to dissipate via cooling (whether passive air, active (fan assisted) air, via water, unobtanium, whatever), after all. This stuff requires careful scrutiny and is not the province of lowly Slashdot contributors, although any company contemplating such questions is certainly free to hire one.
Water is 20 times more efficient at removing heat than air; I know this from my "other" job, which occasionally involves saving lives, where hypothermia is a real risk. Aided with forced air cooling (the wind) you have a very effective method of removing a tremendous amount of heat from a device (the human body) that generates it's own on a constant basis, as long as it's still working (alive), that is. Very much similar to a CPU doing work, and also showing how the inherent 20x can be improved upon, so I won't argue any claims about how efficient this particular method of IBM's is; I reserve my right to fall back to "it sounds like it might work".
Re-using the waste heat is a good idea and some buildings already employ hot-water heating/cooling systems that could easily incorporate a new source of heated water energy. Others ... who knows?
The heat could power a Stirling engine which charges a battery that then powers the coffee maker...
But that's
Electrical-->Thermal-->Kinetic-->Electrical-->Thermal
The best solution would probably be to run the hot water through a Stirling engine and sell the power back to the grid. That way no expensive batteries are needed, and you can still imagine the electrons from the Stirling engine going into the coffee maker :P
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Whoever modded this as flamebait obviously didn't get the joke. Everything you need to understand is is contained in the following link: Dr. Cow Nut Cheese - A Tasty Splurge.
I've been subjected to raw food. Some of the desserts are actually quite amazing, I would buy them on purpose, but basically everything else is a pathetic imitation. I belong to the camp that believes that if you have to pretend a nut or a bean or is meat, that's a sign that you need to eat some meat. If you're happy eating nuts and beans and grains, right on. I do like a nice salad... especially with bacon.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I remember that years ago, visiting a data center in London, the system engineer showed me a water-cooled CPU used on IBM9000 mainframes. It was amazingly engineered, with water in- and outlets running through the thermal dissipator. I think that Cray used a more aggressive approach dipping the whole computer into a cooled bath of Fomblin(TM). It is nice to see this technology kicking back...
IBM's water-cooling rear-door heat exchanger (known as "Cool Blue") was judged the most energy-efficient entry in a "chill-off" between cooling vendors last year. The contest was sponsored by the Silicon Valley Leaders Group and conducted in the data center on Sun's Santa Clara HQ campus. The same unit is also sold by Vette Corp., which offered a video demo at Data Center World.
I first read the title as "Water Cooler Server" I think IBM should do this instead. Build a nice server that doubles as a water cooler. If it also has a toaster drive and a microwave on top it could replace the appliances in my company's kitchenette.
Shades of the 360s/370s in a building?
"There are good ships, and there are wood ships, the ships that sail the sea. But the best ships are friendships, and ma