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Intel Embraces Oil Immersion Cooling For Servers
1sockchuck writes "Intel has just concluded a year-long test in which it immersed servers in an oil bath, and has affirmed that the technology is highly efficient and safe for servers. The chipmaker is now working on reference designs, heat sinks and boards that are optimized for immersion cooling. 'We're evaluating how (immersion cooling) can change the way data centers are designed and operated,' said Mike Patterson, senior power and thermal architect at Intel. 'I think it will catch on. It's going to be a slow progression, but it will start in high-performance computing.' Intel's test used technology from Green Revolution Cooling, which says its design eliminates the need for raised flooring, CRAC units or chillers. Other players in immersion cooling include Iceotope and Hardcore (now LiquiCool)."
Is it really a good idea to put computers and hydrocarbons that closely together?
What if there's a fire?
This brings back good memory for the liquid metal CPU cooler that I used a while back
A review is at http://www.guru3d.com/article/danamics-lmx-superleggera-review/
Unfortunately the vendor already closed its doors, or I would have bought more coolers from them
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I hope this stuff hits the discount rack soon.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
One example of non-flammable oil is Silicone Oil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicone_oil
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Cray did this decades ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2
Breathe continuously
...but if you put the server room near the cafeteria, you can make fries too.
Everything old is new again.
Oil works great until you have to remove something...
Seems to me this would add a considerable load to whatever flooring is in place.
I welcome our new UK computing overlords.
Have gnu, will travel.
Take it out with some gloves, do the repair, put it back. If done properly you would only need to clean up a little bit. You could also simply replace the whole module and ship it back to manufacturer. Even in servers there is little to repair these days, fans, hard drives, anything mechanical is usually the culprit. RAM, SSD, CPU's don't die (after burn-in testing) for decades.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I was considering something like this a few years ago. But instead I went with conventional air cooling inside an ornately carved wooden case instead.
Note that capillary action inside the cable tends to create oil drips all over the place unless you inject glue/epoxy into all your cables to seal the the tiny gaps between insulators..
http://www.pugetsystems.com/aquarium_computer/V2/module.php
June 30, 2000: Slashdot reports that some overclockers have solved their cooling problem by immersing their motherboard in Fluorinert. Crazy kids. Who knew it would eventually catch on?
"Imaginary solutions to real problems."
Are you suggesting someone waste beer on cooling a server? You should be in prison.
Have you ever worked at a company where middle management could not have used daily bunches of fries with extra laxatives?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, he's suggesting beer should be earmarked as 'high performance server coolant', the keg as a 'coolant storage reservoir' and the tap as a 'used coolant bleedoff valve', the latter to be placed in the bofh's office next to the coffee machine.
The first place I ran across the concept was Tom's Hardware, and you can still see the original article. "High Performance Computing" says Intel? Pish Tosh. Kids, you really can try this at home... but get a grown-up to assist you!
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/strip-fans,1203.html
http://web.archive.org/web/19991006062047/http://www.accsdata.com/drffreeze/TestBox2.htm
Sadly, all the pictures appear to have been lost.
I remember this guy going through and dunking his systems in Mineral oil over a decade ago, back when I was in 11th grade. You know, back with the BP6 was amazing shit and slotkets were an essential overclocker's tool.
something that was proven to be fine in 1985?
sure it wasnt oil, it was an exotic chemical developed by 3M but the point still stands
'We're evaluating how (immersion cooling) can change the way data centers are designed and operated,'
its been proven on machines that produced much more waste heat than today 27 years ago in the cray 2
not to mention countless people using oil to cool their high voltage transformers and overclocekd P4's, but yay, GO Intel, grats on the prior art, obious patent in the near future
sigh
I've always wondered - Why aren't cold places full of datacenters? Just pump the air in from outside. Yakutsk (well known to anyone who plays Risk) is a city that gets down to -50C in the winter, or something like that. In the summer it rarely gets above +20C. You'd figure there'd be a booming business building datacenters in these places.
Preferably you would use multiple kegs of different types of beer for redundancy. This is referred to as a "beer storage array".
A: Don't put it in.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Do you want fries with that?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Then go somewhere else, dipshit. As I recall from the minutes of our last meeting, the Nerd Mafia aren't forcing anyone to read /. against their will yet.
+1 to the parent. I used to work at SGI and, as you said, this is old news. One small note, unless rackspace is also doing something different, I believe you are talking about Rackable Systems intead of Rackspace.
This might be the first time Intel is doing it with their HW though. If I recall correctly, SGI did it with their MIPS systems.
Floor loading. How much is a rack of oil filled servers going to weigh?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I spent most of the 80's working on flight simulators that had rows of cabinets on raised flooring. One sim was supposed to be at 70F and the temp was usually so stable that if it was up more than a few degrees we could tell by feel and smell as soon as we walked in the room.
By shear luck I worked on simulators in Las Vegas, New Mexico and South Korea, all places that in the summer you really wouldn't want to be working outside. The constant temp during working hours was great ( though I think it made me more of a wimp for temp extremes when I went outside ) Thinking about the oil immersion and what I'd guess would be warmer ambient temps in computer rooms is a little sad. It was the extra cool computer rooms that I worked in that added to the appeal of my job back then.
After the oil has been heated up by all those processors, pipe it to nearby fast food restaurants to cook French fries and all those other delicious, fattening foods! Yum!
And I was using a mineral oil bath (bar frige guts were used to keep the oil cool) to cool my over clocked Pentium. HDD, optical drives and power supply sat on a grate at the top of the coleman cooler and every thing else was submerged. I even did it with distilled water for a bit but it was to hard to keep the water clean.
"hard drives [...] withstood the oil just fine"
I'd like to know if they used off-the-shelf hard drives for this. I find it hard to believe that a hard drive would work in oil. They usually have breathing holes, wouldn't oil get into the drive and interfere with the moving parts?
Don't worry. It's Coors... Not really suitable for human consumption.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
So, still haven't licked that optical chip problem yet?
I am John Hurt.
GOD I hate this fucking site
You called?
Oh yes, one would think that most geeks would be quite happy to watch shills fuck, as long as they are pretty enough.
Please close the door after you hand in your geek card.
Imagine a beowolf cluster of those!
Oil immersion works, but why bother? 99.99% of datacenters still rely on moving cool air through hot servers to cool them. in some instances you could make a case for mineral oil bath cooling. if you want to push the envelope of server cooling, try using our Vertically cooled servers. www.cirrascale.com. we believe that hot air naturally wants to rise. we pack 72 18"tall 1U wide servers in one rack, or 96 13" tall servers. 10's of thousands deployed we've been able to cool over 30KW of load in one rack with Air on a non raised floor datacenter. We've been doing it for years, and we don't void warranties to do it. "excuse me, Mr. Dell/HP/IBM service center person... this server isn't working.. can you take a look at it please" "Be happy to... Um uh, why is it in a plastic ziplock bag?" "oh that's to keep the mineral oil from dripping on your service lab floor" RMA declined!, Warranty Null & Void! mark.skinner@cirrascale.com
Sure you can cool that with air but if you're adding an extra 50-60% in energy costs to cool it and using immersion cooling will only add 4% in energy costs, that'll certainly get people's attention. Add in reduced costs for CRACS and other related equipment and immersion cooling looks more viable. Finally, if your OEM provides equipment that is spec for immersion cooling, I'm pretty sure that they'll provide warranty support for it as well.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Glancing through the headlines with divided attention, I mentally juxtaposed the headings of two successive stories, yielding "Iran embraces oil immersion for critics".
Ram dies all the time, it's my second highest AFR part after hdd's and ahead of both fans and psu's which are the only other components with a statistically significant failure rate.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_immersion_cooling#Liquid_submersion_cooling
you can pack the chips in higher density with oil, with shorter datapaths.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It is greener because
a) you don't have to cool entire rooms, just the servers. So there is much less heat dissipation.
b) heat transfer from metal to liquid and then liquid to metal is more efficient than having a heat transfer from metal to air, and then air to metal.
More to the point, 5-10L of oil is heavy, if you need to move the machine around, etc.
This is what radiators and heat sinks are for. Full immersion cooling = colour me unimpressed.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Don't worry. It's Budweiser ... Not really suitable for human consumption.
FTFY
Don't worry. It's Fosters... Not really suitable for human consumption.
FTFY
AFTFY
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7302
This was in the days when IBM employees all wore white shirts and ties, and I head stories that the techs would not bother to roll up their sleeves when they worked on these units, because they knew that they would get soaked in oil not matter what they did.
Why is Snark Required?
distilled water is still conductive so either you were very lucky to not fry your computer or you are lying about it.
Distilled water is not meaningfully conductive, but it is still corrosive. Deionized water is not. However, water reacts with itself to form ions, and so DI water rapidly becomes normal water.
The obvious solution is to include a distiller in the loop :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
the oil can be rinsed off in a parts cleaner like you pick up at harbor freight, using odorless mineral spirits or the like.
I can't wait to see data centers try to get permitting for this shit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This might be the first time Intel is doing it with their HW though. If I recall correctly, SGI did it with their MIPS systems.
They made water block cooling for Altix but I can't find any mention of immersion cooling. AFAIK the only computers sold in any notable quantity to feature immersion cooling are Crays.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Been immersing chips in oil for years. Part of the reason I'm the shape I am.
People have been putting their computers in mineral oil for years, clocking their rigs to numbers that would be impressive even today. Must have been well over ten years since I read about it here on /. for the first time.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
or you add a deionization step to the loop instead, since the process is cheaper than distillation : )
Well, you're still going to need a filter, and that means a pump that can overcome it. Perhaps you need both. What do you need for DI, electrodes and a power supply?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's about time dep't:
The Cray-II was immersed in a tank of Fluorinert (type of Freon). This allowed circuit boards to be stacked eight high in a single module:
Six months later Cray had his "eureka" moment. He called the main engineers together for a meeting and presented a new solution to the problem. Instead of making one larger circuit board, each "card" would instead consist of a 3-D stack of eight, connected together in the middle of the boards using pins sticking up from the surface (known as "pogos" or "z-pins"). The cards were packed right on top of each other, so the resulting stack was only about 3 inches high. With this sort of density there was no way any conventional air-cooled system would work; there was too little room for air to flow between the ICs. Instead the system would be immersed in a tank of a new inert liquid from 3M, Fluorinert. The cooling liquid was forced sideways through the modules under pressure, and the flow rate was roughly one inch per second. The heated liquid was cooled using chilled water heat exchangers and returned to the main tank. Work on the new design started in earnest in 1982, several years after the original start date.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
.. it should be with oil :)
Insert
Umm I did fry my computer $3000 down the crapper. I did manage to get it to work for a month that is why I switched to mineral oil. BTW my parents had a distiller so it was easy to get the water.