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:What a waste of water! (Score:5, Interesting)
The community in which a server farms is found surely has a need for what will be thousands of gallons a day. To the benefit of all, I'd suggest diverting a small amount of the heated water (hopefully near boiling) to another piping system in the building ....
I'm sure it could be designed as a closed system with a heat exchange into the ground or outdoors. Indeed, it is the high temperature (relative to outdoors) at which the water is extracted straight off the CPU which makes this more efficient than air conditioning.
However if you wanted to let it feed into the building's hot water system, it turns out there is already a really elegant way to do that: a tempering valve. It's a mechnical device which chooses the right amount of hot and cold water (each of arbitrary, variable temperatures) to produce some fixed output temperature. So to make moderately hot water you can combine some warm water from the servers and some super hot water from the boiler. The "free" server heat offsets the amount of water that needs to be heated by conventional means.
Personally, I like the idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
look at some of the newer blades or blade-ish solutions from supermicro, with 4 dual-socket boards in 2u. Dang near half the space is now taken up by ram slots. Suppose they switched to sodimms packed in like heatsink fins on one of those boards, and you could possibly cram in 2 more sockets with waterblocks.
Similar re-arrangement with blade boards would likely also be possible.
In a dedicated datacenter, I can't think of any real great money saving solutions for the waste heat, but it WOULD allow you to more easily cool everything with a large ground loop to get 50-55 degree water. Add a few more loops so you can melt the snow off the parking lot in the winter and bleed off heat there. Add a large tank of water and radiators to take advantage of cool nights to pre-cool the water before the chillers.
Only chill the water with the chillers when needed. Seems to make a lot of sense to me.
In smaller serverrooms in large office buildings, pre-heat the hot water, pipe the hot water to help heat the building in the winter, and depending on location and if its a mixed use building, you MIGHT be able to sell some of the heat to other building tenants.
Personally, if I was building a new house, I'd have ground loop heat pump for cooling, heating, put a decent sized water tank on the top floor/attic that I could use to preheat hot water in the winter (also be good to hook into for solar hot water on the roof) and a water tank in the basement/crawl space as a source for cooling. Add some electronics to determine where to draw water source, and where to push water return for different devices depending on temperatures of each given tank, as well as when to run ground source heat pump or outside radiator and I think I could cut heating/cooling costs by a huge margin.
Now if only we had a good way to pipe the light from all the blinking LED's to where its needed to remove the ugly florescent lighting. That or get everyone to work by the glow of their CRT/LCD
Not for all (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in several banks using IBM mainframes. The server room was always like a freezer.
I think for now, many companies are perfectly ok with air cooling solutions. Besides, it's much safer to have air-conditioning and fans than some liquid flowing. The simpler the system, the less accidents occur within it...
And believe me when I say that, if a company owns an IBM mainframe, they pay big bucks and they *don't* want any accidents.
Re:IBM needs a physics lesson (Score:4, Interesting)
We could save a lot of money by putting all that light-bulb heat to use.. to bad entropy makes these sorts of schemes uneconomical.
Entropy doesn't make those situations uneconomical. It makes them quite literally impossible.
However, define "use". Remember that you can use heat for more than electricity generation (made impossible in this case). You can't get net energy out of it, thermodynamically speaking. Entropy reigns. But you can still use it as heat.
Hypothetical example: you build a cooling system for a server (water, air, it doesn't matter). You now have a radiator giving off waste heat. That waste heat can be used for some other, non power-generating purpose. What matters is that the heat is carried away from the radiator at a constant rate, or the cooling system will have to work harder to get the same result.
You could use a water tank as a heat sink, then use the heated water for the usual purposes (washing, cooking, what have you). As the hot water heater/heat sink is drained, cool water is pumped in to replace it, allowing the radiator to continue functioning. In this instance the heat is used directly, as heat.
The reason this doesn't run up against thermodynamics is that the hypothetical second use of the heat replaces an existing system you'd have to generate heat for (a conventional hot water heater). The system is still entropic and inefficient, it's just less inefficient than generating the same heat energy a second time. You go from the net waste being X% to the waste being X%. Whether this is worth the bother is a question of the circumstances.
Re:When I come to office today (Score:3, Interesting)
In case you didn't know: Water cooling must be in a closed loop. You should not ever need to replace that water. If you do, you can destroy your coolers, because growing crystals will burst them. I have seen pictures of that.
Re:4000 times? (Score:5, Interesting)
Air is not necessarily simpler (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why nowadays virtually all internal combustion engines of any power output use liquid cooling despite the apparent reliability benefits of air cooling. To take the transition period, WW2, as an example, you only have to look at the complexity of American rotary aircooled designs versus, say, the liquid cooled Merlin engine, to see the point. It would be astonishing if the same transition did not eventually occur for large computers.
Random related fact (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What a waste of water! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Air is not necessarily simpler (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, you are wrong. Designing an air cooled system is hard. You have to deal with problems of filtration (there will be dust - but where do you want it to build up?), ensuring that the flow goes where you want, turbulence, finding room for the ducting, designing the system so that components do not mask other components, and needing to handle high volumes of air. With properly designed water cooling, you have a few quite simple heat removal blocks and a simple plumbing system which can route pretty much anywhere.
The reality is that there are pros and cons to water cooling vs. air cooling and people have to weigh both and decide what works for them. While your post is essentially correct, it's also a bit heavy on the theoretical. I remember working at a place that had water cooled IBM mainframes. This was a US government facility and it was in a building I almost never had to go to. I remember downtimes there because "the water chiller is down" or there was a leak and a hellacious mess of water was under the floor. So please do not continue to suggest that water cooling is 100% great and has no flaws. People went to air cooling for a reason - to stop having to deal with the messes that could happen when there were leaks or downtimes when the water chilling device broke down.