Oil Soaked Servers Coming Soon

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."

Hurrah!

[Rob T Firefly]

This is fantastic! I can't see a single downside to increasing the demand for machine oil in this modern world, nosirree..

Re:and one more (minor problem)

[oyenstikker]

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.

Re:I'm a server admin, and I bet you'd like to see

[FunkyELF]

Sure...I bet most people hiding behind Slashdot anonymity are cute 25 year old women.

I of course believe anything on the internet and bring it up later in conversation...

Somebody : All computer geeks are ugly males.
Me : Not true, there are some hot 25 year old server admins all over the place. I saw one post anonymously without posting a picture the other day.

Seriously, either post a picture of a hot girl wearing a real nerdy admin t-shirt doing some admin stuff or shut the hell up. I'll spare the whole "living in the parent's basement" rant here....

Re:Problems: Connectors, HDD,degradation

[flaming-opus]

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 they had to operate in the dialectric environment.

I will point out that after the T90, Cray moved away from immersion cooling, because it made the machine too difficult to service. The T3E used cold-plates, a somewhat more sophisticated version of the waterblocks you see today in some entusiast machines today. The X1, the current Cray vector system uses phase-change spray caps that actually spray dialectric onto the surface of the chip, which vaporizes the liquid. Even this has proved not cost-effective, even at the price-point of a cray. Cray's announced future products are all air-cooled. If immersion cooling isn't prudent on a cray, I can't possibly see how it's a good idea for a rack full of standard servers.

On the performance front: The T90 offered 60Gflops of performance, which is comparable to a modern 8-core xeon, though with 24GB/s of memory bandwidth per processor, which is STILL, twelve years later, considerably better than Core Duo Xeons, which offer just more than 5GB/s of bandwidth per core. The T90 supported at least 4 gigaring I/O channels at 1GB/s of bandwidth, each. Again, you still need to go to a pretty high-end commodity server to beat the I/O performance of the 12 year old cray. However, your point about per-watt performance is absolutely correct. The T90 consumed hundreds of thousands of watts and required 440volt 3-phase power.