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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.
OVH has been doing this for more than a decade. They credit it as one of the reasons they're able to undercut competitors by so much, by eliminating most of their cooling costs. They get their power usage efficiency, which is the ratio of IT equipment power consumption versus facility power consumption, under 1.1 for their newer datacentres.
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.
The only trick is that deionized water turns into boring old water with some enthusiasm, 'universal solvent' and all that.
If there were a market for pre-leached hardware suitable for various mediums this would presumably be solved; but it hasn't really yet/
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.
but replacement costs are still lower that energy costs long term.
I'm not buying it, my VMWare hosts are pretty large boxes and they've used 630kWhrs since June when they were installed, that comes out to $128/year or so, and that's for primary usage, DX CRAC units have a PUE of ~1.28 which means it costs around $36/year to cool. Even with really cheap servers you'd have to have a LOT of them and have very little effect on AFR to justify it. I'm sure at some scale it makes sense or everyone wouldn't be researching it so hard and doing so many pilot datacenters, but if you don't have thousands and thousands of identical servers (99.999+% of installations) it's just not worth it.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Not all dielectric heat transfer oils are fluorinated, and therefore as unfriendly to the ecology and to workers' health. The best are hydrocarbon based. I developed several different fluids that are being used in computer as well as other high powered electrical equipment (RF transmission, MRI equipment, high torque DC automotive motors, etc.) OptiCool Fluid by DSI Ventures, Inc., is one of these - it's more than 98% biodegradable in standard tests, nontoxic, nonhazardous and does not deplete the ozone layer like fluorinated fluids do. It's extremely stable and has good material compatibility. Plus, it's about 5 - 10% of the cost of fluorinated fluids.