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Immersion Cooling Drives Server Power Densities To Insane New Heights (datacenterfrontier.com)
1sockchuck writes: By immersing IT equipment in liquid coolant, a new data center is reaching extreme power densities of 250 kW per enclosure. At 40 megawatts, the data center is also taking immersion cooling to an entirely new scale, building on a much smaller proof-of-concept from a Hong Kong skyscraper. The facility is being built by Bitcoin specialist BitFury and reflects how the harsh economics of industrial mining have prompted cryptocurrency firms to focus on data center design to cut costs and boost power. But this type of radical energy efficiency may soon be key to America's effort to build an exascale computer and the increasingly extreme data-crunching requirements for cloud and analytics.
All this exascale capability will be used by the highest bidders to crack encryption to enable snooping without a warrant and model new nuclear weapons technologies...
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1sockchuck writes:
By immersing IT equipment in liquid coolant, a new data center is reaching extreme power densities of 250 kW per enclosure. At 40 megawatts, the data center is also taking immersion cooling to an entirely new scale, building on a much smaller proof-of-concept from a Hong Kong skyscraper. The facility is being built by Bitcoin specialist BitFury and reflects how the harsh economics of industrial mining have prompted cryptocurrency firms to focus on data center design to cut costs and boost power. But this type of radical energy efficiency may soon be key to America's effort to build an exascale computer and the increasingly extreme data-crunching requirements for cloud and analytics.
...they want their cooling back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2
Cray was doing it with their super computers back in the 1980's and they probably weren't the first.
This type of thing is exactly what is causing global warming and if we do not stop getting more and more crazy with our computing and data centers we will not have a habitable environment to live in anymore so it won't matter.
"INSANE" new heights?
Has Slashdot been sold to the Gawker network now?
-Styopa
The inherent value of bitcoins is exactly zero, it is just mental masturbation for those who can get no girl. They might as well run all that electricity through a giant immersion heating spiral to boil away a few lakes, it's that wasteful an effort. Silver, gold and gemstones have been around for 7000+ years and as long as ladyfolk exist, those tangible goods will have inherent value, because to get laid you have to give them shiny things to wear. Bangcoin vs bitcoin, choose!
You sure did pack a lot of buzzwords into this post, for an ancient topic.
The difference with this approach is two-phase cooling, where they're actually boiling the heat transfer fluid. That can remove heat a lot more quickly, as long as you can keep a few issues under control:
1) Getting a working fluid with an appropriate boiling point and otherwise acceptable physical parameters (non-flammable, doesn't dissolve your circuitry, etc). 3M has already stepped up to the plate on that.
2) Recondensing the vapor fast enough. This is a lot easier than cooling the circuits directly.
3) Preventing the hot chips from forming a vapor barrier, which insulates the chips from the coolant. The Leidenfrost effect is an example of this, but you can lose efficiency long before you reach the droplets-skittering-around level, especially if there are lots of nooks and crannies where bubbles can get stuck. Presumably the designers have handled this as well.
If they go with a transparent enclosure and some gratuitous lighting, this could become the new mad-scientist/Big Scary Computer visual trope. Let's face it, lab coats, blinking lights and reel-to-reel tape drives are really tired...
I remember reading an article about Moore's Law and some rough calculations that at some point we would have to have the energy of the Sun moving through our computers to keep up with performance. In some sort of Matrix-style universe maybe the Milky-way is just some of super advanced alien data center. :-)
I spilled a glass of wine on my laptop. It didn't go any faster. In fact, it died.
The Chinese miners get a ride off of what is essentially subsidized electric power. Its dirt cheap, and if you grease the right palms, free.
They're not compressing it, they're simply condensing it on a cooling coil. And I assume they're going to need some form of refrigeration for that, so I'm not sure why they talk about getting rid of chillers.
Also, the chip surfaces are shown to be vertical, so the bubbles will rise along the surface of the chip, likely creating a convection current in the process.
As power density grows, the danger of shorts grows, the danger being that at very high power densities, shorts will "short closed" rather than "shorting open", turning your device into an expensive, inefficient arc light. Even at Cray-2 densities (~200W/in^3) shorts could sometimes happily arc away until the power supplies (eventually, maybe) gave up. I (and you) almost certainly don't want to know what gets made in a hot arc in fluorocarbon-submerged electronics, and I guarantee you nobody wants to breathe any of it.
There are also issues with boiling your coolant. In particular, boiling adds a lot of flex and repetitive mechanical strain to your parts, which may limit part or assembly lifetimes. In addition, the vapor-phase coolant generally conducts much, much more poorly than the liquid, potentially making hot-spots and repeated, localized thermal shocks problematic.
Immersion Cooling with 3M(TM) Novec(TM) Engineered Fluids
3M Novec 1230 Fire Protection Fluid Extinguishing