Liquid Cooling On the Rise As Data Centers Crunch Bigger Data

1sockchuck writes The use of liquid cooling will accelerate in the next five years, according to experts in high performance computing, who cite the data-crunching requirements of scientific research, cloud computing, bitcoin and "big data" analytics. "In the HPC world, everything will move to liquid cooling," said Paul Arts, technical director of Eurotech. But there's still plenty of resistance from data center operators wary of bringing liquid near servers, and cost is also an issue. Liquid cooling can offer significant savings over the life of a project, but the up-front installation cost can be higher than those for air-cooled systems. Immersion cooling has gotten a surprise boost from the rise of bitcoin, including a large bitcoin mine inside a Hong Kong high-rise.

Comments

Name drop much?

[bobbied]

So we are moving to liquid cooling... You didn't have to do all the name dropping to make your point.

Buzz words I read in this story: "High performance Computing", "data-crunching", "Cloud computing", "bitcoin", "big data", 3x "bitcoin"..

BitCoin mining is certainly NOT a good reason to move to liquid cooling and it is not driving innovation in data center construction and design. Anybody building a data center for a mining operation clearly hasn't done the math and *will* loos money, liquid cooled or not. Cloud computing is really nothing more than the data centers of yore with IP connectivity, it might be driving people to BUILD new data centers, but nothing about the cloud drives you to liquid cooling. Big Data" might be driving this, but it's claim to fame is the ability to use lots of low power processors in parallel, much like RAID uses lots of spindles to spread out the data. Big data is not driving us to liquid cooling. HPC is the same. All this stuff MIGHT be adding to demand for data processing, but nothing about it drives one to liquid cooling over forced air.

The only reason we will be seeing a rise in liquid cooling is if it is CHEAPER than forced air cooling. Cheaper by taking up less space, being more power efficient, more reliable or any other way of reducing data center operator's costs. Until then, all the name dropping you can do with current buzz words won't really help get liquid cooling adopted. It's all about cost.

I guess it would have been a snoozer of an article to read without all the buzz words.