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Microturbines Power, Cool Servers Simultaneously
jfruhlinger writes "The infrastructure of a large data center poses two main problems: You need to find a way to reliably power all those servers, and you need to figure out a way to deal with the heat those servers put off. Syracuse University and the University of Toledo are experimenting with one gadget to solve both problems. Small power units that run on natural gas, called microturbines, provide reliable DC power separate from the utility grid, and their heat output can paradoxically be harnessed to cool the servers and transmit the heat to other buildings on campus."
Purdue has done this for years, but with macro turbines. The main physical plant provides power, chilled water and heat most of the University.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Can they sell unused power back to the grid?
My gaming PC already sounds like a Hoover and now you're telling me the next evolution in cooling is to put a turbine in it? :o(
Will it finally have meaning?
Will future PCs suffer from turbine lag?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is combined heat and power many facilities do it. It is green in the sense that energy is conserved because waste heat is used rather than discarded. A data center seems to be a good opportunity. The turbine converts 1 CH4 unit to 0.3 electricity, while the absorption chiller will move about as much energy as it consumes (COP 1), which means the 0.7 waste heat off the turbine can easily move the 0.3 units of data center electricity out of the data center and 0.4 units of waste heat (+ 0.3 data center heat) can still be used for another purpose. It might be good for a data center operator, but from a systems perspective the better use for that CH4 is still in a combined cycle utility plant which can make 0.6 electricity, use the waste heat for some co-located industrial facility and make the datacenter run an electric AC (COP ~ 3).
From here?
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Traditional gas turbine generators run 5-10MW for small ones, up to 100MW for large ones. In this case, a microturbine would be something small on 10-100kW. Note that a large automotive turbocharger is capable of 100kW or more. On the plus side, multiple smaller units means a more redundant system with less overhead. On the minus side, several small turbines is both more expensive and less efficient than one large one of the same output. It would be cheaper to just go with two large turbines, each capable of handling the full power load of the server farm.
He said "for a server". While the PicoPSUs are fine for a desktop with modest graphics, they're not going to do much for a multiprocessor server. Besides which, 12V at 50+A is some nasty stuff. You would be better with telco grade -48V hardware if you have to pass a significant amount of power.
Toledo only needs 260 kW electric and 100 tons of cooling, much too small for a traditional gas turbine. In fact BHP's largest project is 2MW electric. I know I've lookup into such a setup but the noise level was unacceptable as our generators sit in the middle of the three buildings in our campus.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Someone's never heard of LP gas-powered refrigerators.
There's no "paradox" in using waste heat to generate chilled water. It's done all the time.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/89710-the-fanless-spinning-heatsink-the-heatsink-is-the-fan
So carrier-grade gear will be DC-DC.
I had one overseas where we had no power.
I do this at home. My computers are really cool. Oh wait. Natural GAS not natural grass. Nevermind.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Toledo only needs 260 kW electric and 100 tons of cooling, much too small for a traditional gas turbine.
Yikes. We've got that much power run to our little compute cluster servicing half a dozen graduate students. We've got a pair of 400A 2-phase 220V panels for our computers, and about as much running to a pair of AC units. Under full load with everything running, we might hit half that. The combustion lab at the other end of the building runs a pair of 800A 3-phase 480V service lines to power resistance heaters for their high pressure air tanks. The lab back on main campus uses around 2MW of steam from the local co-gen plant for their supersonic wind tunnel.
Amusingly, with better than a megawatt of capacity, our off campus facility is still stuck with lousy business class RoadRunner that goes down at least twice a week, with DNS troubles far more often.
Hehe, I run an S&P 500 company on 40kW and 12 tons of AC, virtualization and SSD's for high IOPS loads are a wonderful thing. In fact I'll probably be well below 30kW in 6 months if I can get the 4 shelves of 450GB drives to fill out my new SAN (damn floods in Asia) so I can retire the old one and all the old P4 based servers connected to it that constitute almost half my physical server count at this point.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Windmills do not work that way! Goodnight
Admittedly, "full load with everything running" includes several hundred each of P4s, single core AMD64s, dual core AMD64s, Core2Duos, and a smattering of i7s. The older single core boxes are rarely even turned on any longer.
Once we've got that finally cracked then things will get really interesting. Who knows, we might even have true AI within twenty years.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Windmills do not work that way! Goodnight!!
Furries make the internet go.
Turbines can do a lot of work. They can produce power and compressed air simultaneously. Would be interesting if that compressed air supply was run through one of these. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_tube We have a small one in the shop, a very simple device. Connecting it to our shop air, at 125psi, creates air at one end that will make your fingers go numb, and the other end outputs heat at about hair drier temperatures. The tube is about 6 inches long and 1 inch in diameter.