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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.
Frankly I think the future of liquid cooling is the samething used on the desktop just centrally managed pumping and storage. Honestly all these data centers have just been wasting all this heat, and even worse generating more running air conditioners. All that heat has value, pretty high value actually if they were just willing to spend the extra dollars to collect it all. You just set up a industrial park next to your data center, build in some heat transfer systems and offer the waste heat as value add for a bit of $ into whatever medium the customer wants (air, water, etc). In no time at all you will have all sorts of setups that require heat for their industrial use and are happy to pay less than the cost of using gas or electricity and you end up eliminating air conditioning costs and monetizing 20% of electricity use as heat transfer.
Done right with some proper industrial engineering the system could be relatively maintenance free and rather than spending twice to deal with the heat (paying to generate and paying to cool) you only pay once then monetize the asset you've generated. This is one thing the Scandinavians and Germans have always understood, once you make the heat you might as well use it because it's damned foolish just to waste it. They use waste heat all the time for community driven heating and for all sorts of things and it probably ends up saving all kinds of money.