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Oil Soaked Servers Coming Soon

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wed Apr 11, 2007 08:04 AM
from the yeah-good-luck-with-that dept.
Hardware Hacking Hardware
grease_boy writes "A UK company will start selling server racks submerged in oil baths within a year. Very-PC is working on prototypes and says that because oil transfers heat more efficiently, power usage can be cut by fifty percent."
+ -
story
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  • Heh (Score:4, Funny)

    by peterprior (319967) on Wednesday April 11 2007, @08:06AM (#18687819)
    Bring a whole new meaning to Oil in a rack...... geddit..

    *grabs coat*

  • Interesting (Score:5, Funny)

    by LordPhantom (763327) on Wednesday April 11 2007, @08:07AM (#18687835)
    That sounds like a step forward. At least, until you consider that anyone working on them would get coated in oil... and frankly, server admins coated in oil are really something nobody wants to see.

  • Hurrah! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rob T Firefly (844560) on Wednesday April 11 2007, @08:10AM (#18687863) Homepage Journal
    This is fantastic! I can't see a single downside to increasing the demand for machine oil in this modern world, nosirree..

      • Re:Hurrah! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Odiumjunkie (926074) on Wednesday April 11 2007, @08:32AM (#18688105)
        Exactly, the website and business proposal seem very amateurish. They actually tried using motor oil before realising that by some strange, arcane and entirely unpredictable process it correded PCBs? Am I being too presumptive in assuming that these people know very, very little about electronics?

        Why on earth they didn't at least think to use highly-refined mineral oil like transformer oil is beyond me. I mean, filling a server with motor oil? Are you kidding me?

        Someone saw the Tom's Hardware cooking-oil-cooled-PC experiment that was published a while back, and saw an opportunity to make some money. They didn't realise that Tom's Hardware used oil because it was headline-grabbing, cheap, easy to purchase and --oh yeah-- wasn't being used to cool a server that had to be stable and reliable. That doesn't mean it's the best choice of coolant.

        Hell, you could do it with purified water if you wanted to, but your uptimes might take a hit.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Mr_Blank (172031)
          Here is a link the Tom's Hardware article, "Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil" [tomshardware.com]

          Common sense dictates that submerging your high-end PC in cooking oil is not a good idea. But, of course, engineering feats and science breakthroughs were made possible by those who dared to explore the realms of the non-conventional. Members of the Munich-based THG lab are only too happy to confirm this fact. And not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn't short o

      • Dielectric Fluids "better"? I think not. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Svartalf (2997) on Wednesday April 11 2007, @09:34AM (#18688883) Homepage
        Fluorinert's ozone depleting.
        Novec's a greenhouse gas problem.

        Every other fluid in this class has the same set of issues, unfortunately.

        They may be "clean" and non-toxic, but they're decidedly NOT environment friendly compared to oils-
        and they're a hell of a lot more expensive than oils and not as effective at cooling things.

        The reason why the fluids are used in the supercomputer industry is more the mess caused by the oils
        on everything- and they're actively cooling the systems. Oils are actually superior to the fluids
        in heat-transfer terms- it's why you have oil filled transformers for power distribution instead of
        dielectric fluid filled ones. The specific heat of Novec is actually less than air's- the only advantages
        these fluids have is that you can effectively move a LOT more of it quickly over a surfaces being cooled
        without noise and you can refrigerate the stuff to below ambient to temperatures close to the freezing
        point of water without condensation risks.

        Oils tend to have issues with active cooling. Unless you're implementing vapor-phase, stirling cycle,
        or aggressive peltier active cooling below ambient, you are actually better off with oils than the fluids
        as they won't work as well at cooling- you'll be better off with air cooling.

        This has been discovered by the overclock crowd and they have done a handful of oil-immersed PC's.
        The main reason why you don't see a lot more of those oil immersed PC's is oil wicking
        by the wires. Each point where a connector would be or a peripheral like a CD/DVD or hard disk is
        hooked in has wires coming out of the system that will wick the oil or dielectric fluid out all over
        the place. In order to deal with this specific problem, you'd have to resort to specialized sealed
        header and other connectors for each edge case for SATA/PATA, VGA/DVI, etc. Those don't come cheap,
        so the overclocker crowd tends to just resort to fishtank and similar plays for lan parties or
        PAX/QuakeCon, etc.

        So, in the end, it is a mixed bag. The oils are messier, but are actually more environmentally friendly
        than the dielectric fluids- and they have a higher heat capacity and thermal conductivity in many cases.
  • I can see how people would want to do this when hacking their own motherboard, but I would not like to see this become commonplace. For a starter, what to do with the oil after it has been used. I presume that you cannot reuse the oil to bake fries in. And I would really like to know if this would have negative implications considering the life-time of the equipment as well.
    • THat oil can be reused real easy. e.g. to convert it to diesel oil to run your car on.

      The only problem i can see is that once you bath your pc components in oil you cannot reuse them elsewhere because the contacts get all dirty. Also i wonder if the components on a Motherboard can handle being oaked in oil. I can imaginge some component will solute in oil after a month or so.

      Note also that Harddrives can not be soaked in oil (they need the air cushing )
  • So will Al Gore come out with a corn-oil version?
            • Yell at me if you like, but I live in a small apartment, use compact florescent bulbs where practical, and don't have a car. And yet I still use more resources than a starving peasant, so I guess we all "could do better". You can buy into this "offsets" garbage if you like, but it is just as much B.S. as the conservatives disregarding everything the man has to say just because he happens to be a hypocrite. He may not be adding CO2, but he is certainly using up resources at a prodigious rate. He plays up thi

  • Cut power in half? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by theantipop (803016) on Wednesday April 11 2007, @08:15AM (#18687921)

    "It is possible to cut power consumption in half," managing director Peter Hopton told New Scientist. "You don't need to drive inefficient fans, or the usual air conditioning."
    Do data centers really use as much power cooling the server farms as running them?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Sobrique (543255)
      It's probably not far off. Bear in mind that a lot of the 300W of your power supplies in each system is dissipated as heat. I've got a datacenter that's had water cooled racks installed (which as you might imagine, has horrific 'overheads' on installation, cableing and maintenance). At £5k/rack, + overheads, it was still a cheaper solution than standard 19" rack + aircon bill.

    • Re:Cut power in half? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Spazmania (174582) on Wednesday April 11 2007, @08:34AM (#18688131) Homepage
      Do data centers really use as much power cooling the server farms as running them?

      More or less, yes. Efficiency on the A/C units is usually around 2:1 and sometimes approaches 3:1, that is you get twice the cooling as the energy you put in. Since nearly 100% of the power in to servers is expressed as heat, you need the same amount of cooling. Now add inefficiencies in the cooling architecture, power for fans in the servers, inefficiency of semiconductors when running hot, etc. When you add it all up you're approaching 50% of the total power consumption.

      Its a disingenuous marketing claim though. Cooling oil is no more efficient than cooling air and convection won't be the final word at an industrial scale - they'll need pumps which consume as much energy as fans

      On the plus side 10kva in a oil-cooled rack will be a hell of a lot quieter than 10kva in an air-cooled rack with a hundred 3cm fans running at 7krpm.
      • Efficiency on the A/C units is usually around 2:1 and sometimes approaches 3:1, that is you get twice the cooling as the energy you put in.

        In this /., we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

      • While I generally agree with the parent, AC is more efficient than 2:1 or 3:1 . An older SEER 10 AC unit is then 2.94 W [heat] removed per 1 W [electric]. The newer SEER 13 units are 3.8 W/W .

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by harrkev (623093)
            You are right. It IS marketing propaganda. If you have 1.3MW of power used by CPU/motherboard/drives, you still have to remove 1.3MW if heat. Period. Using oil just lets you MOVE the heat easier (and quiter, and in less space), but that heat still has to go SOMEWHERE.

            Of course, depending on the location, it might be easy enough to circulate the oil to cooling coils outside, but that still takes energy.

            Given these guys obvious engineering expertise (not), I wonder if they have ever heard of Polyalphaolef
  • HWSpirit did a proof of concept here [hwspirit.com]. I wonder if these guys were inspired by that.

    But it's a decent idea. Oil has a high thermal capacity and will circulate through convection keeping the temperature down. Repairs and upgrades aren't going to be all that pleasant but some swarfega will get the grease of your hands after changing the motherboard.

  • Oil Soaked Servers? (Score:5, Funny)

    by pandrijeczko (588093) on Wednesday April 11 2007, @08:17AM (#18687957)
    Do you want me to make the joke about "fried chips" or do you want to do it?

    • Do you want me to make the joke about "fried chips" or do you want to do it?

      Give it to us raw -- and wriggling! You keep nasty chips!

  • Problems: Connectors, HDD,degradation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Flying pig (925874) on Wednesday April 11 2007, @08:26AM (#18688039)
    They will have to run the HDDs outside the oil because they do, in fact, need ventilation. Though perhaps you can get totally sealed HDDs from somewhere by now.

    However, the main problem I see is connectors. Existing connectors have been developed to work in air, except for a few exotic types. Watertight connectors are designed to work with wet environment outside and dry electronics inside, not vice versa, but in any case existing technology would require standard connectors to be used entirely submerged in dielectric. Modern connectors have much smaller contact surfaces than they did even ten years ago, and the distance liquid would have to move by capillary action before breaking the contact is quite small. It's hard to see how you could do accelerated life testing for such a system, which means it could be many years before we know whether they are reliable or not.

    I recall when doing research involving electronics in Fluorinert we had to make soldered connections in liquid. Contacts that were frequently made and broken could be pressure contacts, but that is quite different from the situation in a server. And if we had known of a cheap substitute for Fluorinert we would have used it. The majority of oils degrade quite interestingly - you wouldn't expect bacteria to live in them but they can and do if the conditions are right.

    These guys may have a workable solution to all the problems, but I can't help thinking that technology will make the concept obsolete. How does the performance of an old Fluorinert-cooled Cray stack up against a modern server in flops and GBit/s of IO per watt? (Hint: Don't bet on the Cray.)

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by LWATCDR (28044)
      I wonder if these servers would have to be "disposable" Trying to swap out parts is going to be a major problem. Think of the time to drain the server and get it clean enough to swap out a part. Forget about adding RAM. Probably not an issue for places that use many 1Us for a web front end but for a lot of places it seems like a big pain. I hate to bring it up but what about the fire hazard. Most oils I have see will burn if you get it hot enough.
      For everyone that was posting about hard drives I doubt tha
    • The design with the Cray 2 was a bit excessive. They just had the heat reach fluorinert's boiling point and there was a vapor collector and a condensor tower [flickr.com]. As you'll recall, the temperature of a liquid will not never exceed the boiling point until it all turned to vapor. That's why car are water cooled. If you have insufficient heat transfer from the radiator, the vapor pressure blows the cap and you have a really visual feedback that it's time to stop. You won't damage anything if you stop before you evaporate all your coolant. Fluorinert boiled at 56 C, a convenient temperature that makes it safe to work around the computer. Oil boils at 175 C. If you have a few boiling racks you will not want humans in your server room and you'll probably burn down your air cooled servers. Oil cooled system will not used the clever technique used by Cray: no pump or other circulatory system was needed and working temperature was ultra stable. Fluorinert and oil cooling are completely different things and I don't think you can compare them.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by flaming-opus (8186)
      To answer your question - the last Submersion cooled cray was the mid-90's era T90, which submersed 32 processor boards and the memory, in a pool of flourinert. It did not, howerver, submerse the rest of the system, in particular the I/O, which would use standard pin connectors. One of the more exotic pieces of technology in the T90 was the robotic claw connectors that clamped down on the edges of compute boards at 400 contacts per inch. The unit costs of these connectors were very high, in part because the

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by oyenstikker (536040)
        Simple. Have the outgoing cables come out of the top and connect to a patch bay, so the little oil that capillary action's itself through the cable will gravity itself right back down the outside.

  • oil (Score:4, Funny)

    by normuser (1079315) * <normuser@whyisthishere.com> on Wednesday April 11 2007, @08:38AM (#18688187) Homepage Journal
    Oily racks you say? You know this just might catch on.

  • Just what overweight geeks need (Score:4, Funny)

    by DanielMarkham (765899) * on Wednesday April 11 2007, @08:40AM (#18688219) Homepage
    It's not enough that we have jobs where we sit down all of the time, now we have a computer that's also a deep-fryer.

    Or, if they use motor oil, will Penzoil and other oil companies start running TV ads? "I couldn't play DOOM 6 until I switch to 10W-40 ultra. Now I kick butt"

    Maybe the computers can start coming with chrome valve covers.
  • "Hello, I'm reviewing your application and I don't see any IT exposure in it at all, no education, no experience... what makes you think that you're suited for a job at a server farm?"

    "Well, I was a fry cook at McDonalds for 2 years"

    "You're hired"

  • All that is old is new again...? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by vmxeo (173325) on Wednesday April 11 2007, @08:56AM (#18688423) Homepage Journal
    Didn't IBM use oil-cooling on one of their mini/mainframe computer systems back in the day? I seem to recall hearing stories of low oil indicators on the machines. Unfortunately my Google searches on the subject are coming up dry...

  • Yeah, yeah... April Fool to you too... (Score:3, Funny)

    by pandrijeczko (588093) on Wednesday April 11 2007, @09:15AM (#18688623)
    Let me guess...

    The oil soaked server runs "Mazola" Firefox with the "Grease" Monkey plugin on "Sunflower" Solaris.

    • Re:Changing the oil (Score:4, Interesting)

      by aadvancedGIR (959466) on Wednesday April 11 2007, @08:28AM (#18688069)
      I know it was a joke, but I fear that, by replacing air by oil, the weight of a server rack might be a problem if it is not located in the basement.

      Anyhow, even by reducing the power requirements by using efficient passive cooling to evacuate heat from the chips to the room, you still need to evacuate heat from the room.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Ihlosi (895663)
        We have an A/C unit that is (according to the heating/cooling guys who installed it) nearly twice as large as what you would expect for a building that size.

        Looks like they had no clue then. Building size doesn't produce heat, building contents do. People are 300W each, and you can probably assume computers to be ~200-300W each, too.

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