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Small Startup Prevails In Server Cooling 'Chill Off'

Posted by samzenpus on from the cool-as-ice dept.

miller60 writes "A small startup has shown exceptional energy efficiency in a data center 'chill off' comparing server cooling technologies. Clustered Systems posted the best numbers in the 18-month vendor evaluation sponsored by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. The Menlo Park, Calif. company built a prototype server that uses no fans and cools processors with a cold plate with tubing filled with liquid coolant. The testing accidentally highlighted the opportunity for additional energy savings, when the Clustered Systems unit continued to operate during a cooling failure that raised the chiller plant water temperature from 44 to 78 degrees F."

8 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. "Silicon Valley Leadership Group" by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative

    The "Silicon Valley Leadership Group" is kind of a joke. It used to be the "Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group", the lobby for the semiconductor industry, but after most of the semiconductor plants closed, it lost focus.

  2. Kinda late to the party by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 4, Informative

    Seymour Cray's 6600 was cooling with liquid-filled cold plates... in 1962. That's, er, 48 years?

    1. Re:Kinda late to the party by roguer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Seymour ran refrigerant (fleurinert?) through coldplates on all his designs (and their descendants) up through the Cray-2. I am told that he used to call himself "the best refrigerator repair man in the industry". His downfall came when he abandoned coldplates for the full refrigerant emmersion that gave the Cray-2 its distinctive "aquarium" look. Unfortunately, in later designs he had to run refrigerant across the emmersed boards so fast that it actually caused friction corrosion.

      But, yeah, you have a point. Coldplates are old hat in the supercomputing industry. BTW, RISC is too. We used to joke that it stood for "Really Invented by Seymour Cray".

      --
      It's a penny for your thoughts, but you put in your two cents worth. Somebody, somewhere is making a penny. SteveWright
  3. Ambient noise by rcw-home · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm pretty impressed by how quiet their demo rack is - it'd be a challenge to get a good audio recording of a conversation right next to a full rack of air-cooled 1U servers - it's frustrating using a cell phone in most server rooms, just because of the fan noise. 1U systems are the worst simply because the form factor requires a large number of tiny fans running at high speed.

    Even if there's some serious impracticalities with their approach, eliminating that fan noise is a huge selling point.

  4. Cost by markbao · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The world is no stranger to liquid-cooling in computers, but this is pretty impressive. Does anyone have any numbers on how much traditional cooling costs compared to estimated costs from this company?

  5. Brief description of the technology by bananaendian · · Score: 4, Informative

    The video shows a full size rack with 36 standard 1U rack servers installed on it.

    On each server they have installed milled metal blocks on all the components to bring them in contact with the upper cover of the server which has a metal foil interface to complete the fit for maximum heat conduction.

    The actual coolant is circulated in the rack in cold plates or shelves installed between the servers. Coolant is exchanged from the top of the racks into the piping that takes it to the heat exchanger outside.

    Comment: with this kind of system cooling is a function of the coolant temperature and flow. With the metal blocks, interfaces and surface areas that I could see it is nothing special to be able to cool down the components to very low temperatures. The engineer talks of 450 W dissipation per server with 150W previously going to the fans alone. So getting 300W of heat out of there isn't a problem with a cold plate that size. Military avionics use these a lot: Conduction Cooled cPCI and other standard cards. No need for liquid flow even. Just use aircraft structure as a cold plate. Those custom milled metal interfaces are expensive to make but its still a lot cheaper than anything really MILSPEC and there is no issues with vibration on this one. This would be called modified COTS.

    --
    www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
    1. Re:Brief description of the technology by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No, I'm not. I actually fly some of them, and our avionics are cooled by cold plates with jet fuel running through them. Think about aircraft built this century, not last century, with very dense avionics.

  6. Re:Imagine... by CarpetShark · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think the appropriate expression is "Imagine having a truckload of shares in these guys, when google buys them out."