Liquid Cooling On the Rise As Data Centers Crunch Bigger Data

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @11:21AM from the it's-getting-hot-in-here dept.

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.

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The trend in servers seems to be "lousy cooling" by iamacat · 2014-12-10 16:43 · Score: 3, Interesting

There is a realization that with cheapest, lousiest cooling a substantial number of servers may kick the bucket, but replacement costs are still lower that energy costs long term. See this paper for example. Liquid cooling doesn't fit the bill for general computing, although it may for very specialized cases like quantum computers that need to be cooled by liquid helium.