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Google's Chiller-Less Data Center

Posted by samzenpus on from the cooler-than-cool dept.

1sockchuck writes "Google has begun operating a data center in Belgium that has no chillers to support its cooling systems, which will improve energy efficiency but make weather forecasting a larger factor in its network management. With power use climbing, many data centers are using free cooling to reduce their reliance on power-hungry chillers. By foregoing chillers entirely, Google will need to reroute workloads if the weather in Belgium gets too warm. The facility also has its own water treatment plant so it doesn't need to use potable water from a local utility."

6 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Unreliable... by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So basically everything gets rerouted on a hot day. Ok, that sounds fine until you realize that most of the outages of Google's products were due to, rerouting. And also, it seems odd that the cost of building a (hopefully redundant) datacenter that is this unreliable would be less than consolidating it with another one and using electrical cooling.

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    1. Re:Unreliable... by martas · · Score: 5, Interesting

      well, it might be unreliable, but i think you're overestimating the reliability of normal data centers. even if failure is twice as likely at this data center than others, i think it still improves overall performance and reliability enough that it's worth building. or at least google seems to think so.

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      weinersmith
    2. Re:Unreliable... by jhw539 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You do not need a chiller to operate a datacenter in many environments at all. Based on the 2nd edition of ASHRAE's Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments (which was developed with direct input from the major server providers), you can run a datacenter at up to 90F. Seriously, 90F into the rack. When it comes out the back of the rack, you collect the heat exhaust at 100-110F. "Chilled" water at 81F is more than enough to knock that 110F down to 90F- ready to go back into the front of the rack.

      The 81F water can be produced directly from open cooling towers (direct evaporation) whenever the wetbulb is lower than 76F (4 degree approach plus a 1F on your flat plate that isolates the datacenter loop from the open tower loop).

      You designed an efficient datacenter, but you're five years behind cutting edge (not actually a bad thing for most critical environment clients). The next wave of datacenters will have PUEs of 1.2 or less and redefine the space from a noisy but cool space to hang out to a hot machine room with industrial heat exhaust design.

      I actually just finished a chiller less 8MW schematic design and analysis for a bid. It was my second this month (the first was a cake walk - an extreme Twb of 67F, the second was west coast light conditions).

      PS: Secondary pumps? Seriously? Unless you have to boost up to 25 psi to feed a Cray or some other HPC I thought everyone who cared had moved onto variable primary-only pumping. (Sorry, feeling a bit snarky after hitting a 40 hour week on Weds...)

  2. Worth the tradeoff? by Clockowl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Is it really worth to be dependent on the weather in exchange for a lower energy bill?

  3. Re:This might be a dumb question by david.given · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The short answer is yes --- water takes a staggering amount of energy to change temperature (it's one of the many properties the stuff's got that's really weird). A big lake makes an ideal dumping ground for waste heat. What's more, the environmental impact is going to be minimal: even the biggest data centre isn't going to produce enough waste energy to have much effect.

    (A big data center consumes about 5MW of power. The specific heat capacity of water is about 4kJ/kg.K, which means that it takes 4kJ to raise the temperature on one kilogram of water by one kelvin. Assuming all that gets dumped into the lake as heat, that means you're raising the temperature of about 1000 litres per second by one kelvin. A small lake, say 1km x 1km x 10m, contains 10000000000 litres! So you're going to need to run your data centre for ten million seconds, or about 110 days, to raise the temperature by one measly degree. And that's ignoring the cooling off the surface, which would vastly overpower any amount of heat you could put into it.)

    (The same applies in reverse. You can extract practically unlimited amounts of heat from water. Got running water in your property? Go look into heat pumps.)

    In fact, if you were dumping waste heat into a lake, it would make sense to try and concentrate the heat to produce hotspots. You would then use this for things like fish farming. Warm water's always useful.

  4. Re:Unreliable...Probably not by j79zlr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That is where the ice storage systems become interesting and cost effective. In the states, usually half of a commercial energy bill is peak demand. If you can transfer that energy usage to night time to build up your ice storage and transfer your main power draw to off peak the savings can be very significant and create payback times in months not years.

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