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New Approach To Immersion Cooling Powers HPC In a High Rise
miller60 writes "How do you cool a high-density server installation inside a high rise in Hong Kong? You dunk the servers, immersing them in fluid to create an extremely efficient HPC environment in a hot, humid location. Hong Kong's Allied Control developed its immersion cooling solution using a technique called open bath immersion (OBI), which uses 3M's Novec fluid. OBI is an example of passive two-phase cooling, which uses a boiling liquid to remove heat from a surface and then condenses the liquid for reuse, all without a pump. It's a slightly different approach to immersion cooling than the Green Revolution technique being tested by Intel and deployed at scale by energy companies. Other players in immersion cooling include Iceotope and Hardcore (now LiquidCool)."
Waiting for a watered-down version for the consumer space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert
Hope they don't have a fire.
Using a boiling liquid is asking for trouble. True, a phase change like boiling can conduct away a lot of heat, but there are other issues. First of all, vapour does not conduct as much heat as liquid, so there's going to be an insulating layer of vapour over all of the components that need it most. It's called the Leidenfrost Effect. Second, bubbles expanding and collapsing causes an effect called cavitation, which can erode components. It is a constant sonic vibration which can induce metal fatigue in delicate wires (such as the leads inside a chip), and can cause cracks in inflexible materials such as silicon chips and ceramics (capacitors and resistors).
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Most buildings have a core water chiller. It wouldn't be that hard to have a heat exchanger going to the fluid circulation system, then liquid cool every rack and item inside.
The big problem is engineering the valves and connectors. It would be nice for a leak or an improper connection to be detected, and a valve shutting off coolant until it is fixed. Having quick-connect connectors which will shut off coolant flow when disconnected is also imperative. The goal would be for an almost immediate disconnection if someone cut a hose, ideally both active valves that shut off if there is a leak, as well as check valves so coolant cannot move backwards, so as little coolant as possible gets lost if something gets punctured.
TFA doesn't say exactly which 'Novec' heat transfer fluid they use; but all of them have enthusiastic vapor pressures even at 25 degrees, and low boiling points. The devices shown in the pictures (unless specially opened just for the glamor shots) also don't look particularly well sealed.
How do they deal with that? Does the 3M guy follow the milkman every morning, and deliver another couple thousand liters? Is there a chiller/condenser somewhere in the air circulation system that scrubs most or all of the escaping vapor? Are the racks normally sealed tight?
I, again, couldn't get any solid quotes for medium-large quantities of the heat transfer fluids; but fancy fluoridated-carbon engineered fluids aren't generally cheap enough to just ignore large losses of. Boiling may well be more efficient than pumping as a heat transfer method at the board level; but I'd be amazed if they can get away with running this as anything other than a closed loop, despite the pictures seemingly showing otherwise.
Anybody know?
So, what, is Slashdot shilling for 3M now or something? /., how much did 3M pay you to whore yourselves out on this one?
Liquid cooling of hardware isn't a new idea at all. How is this even a news story?
Come on
One thing that was mentioned was removing the air cooling parts from the servers. I'm wondering now if we'll see server vendors putting together configurations that will be specifically designed for immersion technology and if that will improve density / cubic meter in terms of rack space. Wouldn't this lead to higher density configurations, say 2 or 3 times current rack density or more? Also what about disk drives (rotating) can they be immersed?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
http://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php
I always thought this was a cool idea, albeit pretty messy. But this company will sell you a "case" (a modified fish aquarium) and the components to go into it. They also have some specs on how well this thing cools.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If maintenance on a single unit with a rack is needed, wouldn't you have to shut down everything in the rack and drain the fluid bath? This approach would create the need for quite novel operational approaches.
...the bad guy will point his gun at the server room, threatening to shatter the glass case with the server cooling liquid in it, he'll shoot, and use the rushing liquid to block the heroes from stopping his escape.
It's actually kind of neat to toss out your fans and just dunk your computer into a tank like it's a deep fryer. Of course, I didn't do this with my best build, instead I used older parts and made a pretty fun project. I no longer have any of those parts but it was a blast going against conventional logic. There are some parts that aren't meant to be dunked so keep that in mind if you value your life lol
what Cray used to do. And what IBM abandoned thirty years ago. Novec sounds like a very useful material for this sort of thing.
I mean, I imagine solid state storage would be fine, but I can't see a mechanical disk behaving too well in this sort of environment. Unless it's completely watertight, of course. And I don't see disks going away anytime soon.
I suppose you could have a separate, air-cooled storage bay, but that would introduce new exciting engineering difficulties...
(To be absolutely fair, I imagine something like this is going to cost a bit, and if you are spending that much already you might as well be springing for solid state storage...)
Other players in immersion cooling include Iceotope and Hardcore (now LiquidCool).
Who's principle leads are AcidBurn and CrashOverride respectively, no doubt.
Located in a high rise, are they cooling and condensing the Novec fluid into the ambient air? If they're not dumping the heat outside, they'd be bad neighbors: externalizing the cost of cooling and cooking the people above them.
I wonder how Novec compares cost wise to Fluorinert. We use Fluorinert at work here and I know the larger FC-72 jugs are very costly at around $1500 and the FC-40 jugs are priced as if they were filled with liquid gold, over 3 grand and much smaller than the FC-72 jugs.