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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.
"INSANE" new heights?
Has Slashdot been sold to the Gawker network now?
-Styopa
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...