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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 ....
I'm sure it could be designed as a closed system with a heat exchange into the ground or outdoors. Indeed, it is the high temperature (relative to outdoors) at which the water is extracted straight off the CPU which makes this more efficient than air conditioning.
However if you wanted to let it feed into the building's hot water system, it turns out there is already a really elegant way to do that: a tempering valve. It's a mechnical device which chooses the right amount of hot and cold water (each of arbitrary, variable temperatures) to produce some fixed output temperature. So to make moderately hot water you can combine some warm water from the servers and some super hot water from the boiler. The "free" server heat offsets the amount of water that needs to be heated by conventional means.
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.
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.
this is a situation where a link to goatse would actually answer your question.
-I only code in BASIC.-
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.
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.
Entropy doesn't make those situations uneconomical. It makes them quite literally impossible.
However, define "use". Remember that you can use heat for more than electricity generation (made impossible in this case). You can't get net energy out of it, thermodynamically speaking. Entropy reigns. But you can still use it as heat.
Hypothetical example: you build a cooling system for a server (water, air, it doesn't matter). You now have a radiator giving off waste heat. That waste heat can be used for some other, non power-generating purpose. What matters is that the heat is carried away from the radiator at a constant rate, or the cooling system will have to work harder to get the same result.
You could use a water tank as a heat sink, then use the heated water for the usual purposes (washing, cooking, what have you). As the hot water heater/heat sink is drained, cool water is pumped in to replace it, allowing the radiator to continue functioning. In this instance the heat is used directly, as heat.
The reason this doesn't run up against thermodynamics is that the hypothetical second use of the heat replaces an existing system you'd have to generate heat for (a conventional hot water heater). The system is still entropic and inefficient, it's just less inefficient than generating the same heat energy a second time. You go from the net waste being X% to the waste being X%. Whether this is worth the bother is a question of the circumstances.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Just try this. See how long you can stand naked (OK wear some running shorts) in air at 5 degrees centigrade. Probably fifteen minutes standing still or indefinitely if running.
Now see how long you can stay in water at 5 degrees centigrade. For most people it would be less than a minute - you may not even be able to get in.
Try to keep up IBM.
IBM was water-cooling machines at least as early as the 1970s.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Water has a density of 1000kg per meter^3. Air is 1Kg per meter^3. Water has a much higher heat capacity than air. Current systems go from CPU->Air->Water and you need a thermal gradient for each, not to mention that blasting cold air through a server wastes quite a lot of air. Cut out the air and 4000 times seems quite likely, but I can't be bothered running the numbers.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
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.
Problems with crystals comes with some types of water where there are a high degree of lime in it. While its simpler to just use heat exchangers you could also use waterfilters that separates the minerals from the water before use. Most places have water with low amounts of lime and minerals so deposits arent really a problem.
I had a company that made solar panels (heating houses) and inverters for house warming. In some cases we took ground water and extracted heat directly from it and when taken apart those heat exchangers very rarely showed any deposits at all even after ten years of use.
The easiest way to see what type of water you have is to look in your toilet and your sink. If there are much deposits there (not brown ones) you have water thats high with lime or other minerals.
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