IBM Pushing Water-Cooled Servers, Meeting Resistance 159
judgecorp writes "IBM has said that water-cooled servers could become the norm in ten years. The company has lately been promoting wider user of the forty-year-old mainframe technology (e.g., here's a piece from April 2008), which allows faster clock speeds and higher processing power. But IBM now says water cooling is greener and more efficient, because it delivers waste heat in a form that's easier to re-use. They estimate that water can be up to 4,000 times more effective in cooling computer systems than air. However, most new data center designs tend to take the opposite approach, running warmer, and using free-air cooling to expend less energy in the first place. For instance, Dutch engineer Imtech sees no need for water cooling in its new multi-story approach which reduces piping and saves waste."
Re:Frosty Piss (Score:3, Informative)
Some tanks have air conditioning.
Air conditioning the whole tank does not make sense because once you fire the cannon a few times the whole place is very hot.
What they do is have a hose that hooks up to the special overall tankers wear and supplies you with cool air where you need it most.
The hose connector is at the center of the suit.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Ratio of specific heat capacities (Score:5, Informative)
All IBM is saying is that water is a better heat conductor, and air is an insulator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_heat_capacity [wikipedia.org]
Water ; 4 J /cm^3 K /cm^3 K
Air ; 0.001 J
Water/Air = 4000 times more heat transfer.
So, given the choice, you would use water to transfer heat.
Re:I watercooled my server years ago!!! (Score:3, Informative)
You can recycle your water
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that, but either way you can't.
In case you mean replacing the water: You're doing it wrong! ^^ The more often you replace the water, the more likely it is for your coolers to get some mineral crystals to grow. In two years, your CPU cooler might suddenly burst, killing your whole electronics.
This even happens with distilled water, because there is no 100% in nature.
There are even galleries out there of such bursts, including images of huge crystals inside the coolers.
So usually, you use some protective fluid to mix with the water. And that stuff can't be recycled I think.
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Re:When I come to office today (Score:4, Informative)
Problems with crystals comes with some types of water where there are a high degree of lime in it. While its simpler to just use heat exchangers you could also use waterfilters that separates the minerals from the water before use. Most places have water with low amounts of lime and minerals so deposits arent really a problem.
I had a company that made solar panels (heating houses) and inverters for house warming. In some cases we took ground water and extracted heat directly from it and when taken apart those heat exchangers very rarely showed any deposits at all even after ten years of use.
The easiest way to see what type of water you have is to look in your toilet and your sink. If there are much deposits there (not brown ones) you have water thats high with lime or other minerals.
Re:Ratio of specific heat capacities (Score:5, Informative)
My personal experience with using passive (no fans) water-cooling with my desktop PC at home (the setup is similar to this: http://www.silent.se/bilder/reserator1_c_p-410.jpg [silent.se]) is that that it's exceptionally effective.
In my setup a cylinder full of water surrounded by fins to dissipate the heat and with a pump to make water flow as the only active element have replaced a big nasty CPU heatsink with a large fan (on a heavily overclocked CPU)* and a set of fans on a single high-end graphics card of the previous generation. At an ambient temperature in the room where this is in of about 20-25C The whole thing idles at 28C and stays at around 60C with everything going on at max - considering that with everything going on at full throttle the system is using almost 400W, it's impressive how efficient it all is.
In practice, "home" water-cooling mostly just uses the water as a heat carrier to quickly move the heat around from the inside of the computer case (and it's constrained airflow) to a place where it is easier to dissipate that heat into the ambient air either with a more efficient radiator and fans (for the active systems) or with an outsized heatsink (like the one I use which has roughly 10 times the surface of the ones it replaces).
In an "industrial" deployment, said heat being carried in the water cold potentially be used/dissipated in many more ways. For example large pipes could transport the hot water coming out of a data-center to the sea or a river and let it be dissipated there (keeping a closed circuit and returning the cool water back for reuse). The actual running costs in terms of active elements for such a system are limited to the cost of running a number of large efficient water pumps that make the water flow around the circuite as opposed to most data-centers out there at the moment that use (less efficient) small fans to move the air out of the blade boxes into the room and then active refrigeration to cool down the air in the room.
* Since the point of my argument is not to show off my "virtual dick", I've moved the relevant stats down here for those that are curious on the details: CPU - Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz which is overclocked to 3.2GHz, GPU - GTS280
Re:I watercooled my server years ago!!! (Score:3, Informative)
True, and everybody knows that.
Or so I thought. Yet this assclown [slashdot.org], who clearly doesn't know the difference between an IBM and a BMW, is at +5 insightful.
Re:Any prediction over ten years is null and void (Score:4, Informative)
I doubt Bill Gates ever said that. He's claimed the contrary on several occasions:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/gatesivu.htm [usnews.com]
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484 [wired.com]
But yes, making predictions for the future is dumb. Unless you control the future, in which case it's not really a prediction *cough* Moore's Law *cough*
Re:Air is not necessarily simpler (Score:4, Informative)
I think you mean radial engines [wikipedia.org], because rotary engines [wikipedia.org] may look similar when not running but are an entirely different thing.
Air cooled engines are still used in small planes, their weight to power ratio is better than in water cooled engines. In larger aircraft both water and air cooled engines were replaced by turbines.
Also, air cooled engines are still widely used in motorcycles. I think the main motive for not using them in cars anymore is due mostly to the difficulty in cooling in an enclosed region, have you seen how cramped is a modern car under the hood?
The main advantage of water cooling is that it's easier to carry the heat away to some place where it can be either reused for some other purpose or dumped to the environment. With air cooling you have to bring a substantial amount of cool air to where the heat is being generated.
However I still think computers are mostly in the range where it's easier to bring the air in. The amount of heat dissipated per volume of equipment is not so great that the additional complexity of water cooling would be justified.