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Data Storage

Liquid Cooling On the Rise As Data Centers Crunch Bigger Data 25

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-getting-hot-in-here dept.
1sockchuck writes The use of liquid cooling will accelerate in the next five years, according to experts in high performance computing, who cite the data-crunching requirements of scientific research, cloud computing, bitcoin and "big data" analytics. "In the HPC world, everything will move to liquid cooling," said Paul Arts, technical director of Eurotech. But there's still plenty of resistance from data center operators wary of bringing liquid near servers, and cost is also an issue. Liquid cooling can offer significant savings over the life of a project, but the up-front installation cost can be higher than those for air-cooled systems. Immersion cooling has gotten a surprise boost from the rise of bitcoin, including a large bitcoin mine inside a Hong Kong high-rise.
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Liquid Cooling On the Rise As Data Centers Crunch Bigger Data More

Liquid Cooling On the Rise As Data Centers Crunch Bigger Data

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  • OVH (Score:3)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @06:36PM (#48568707)

    OVH has been doing this for more than a decade. They credit it as one of the reasons they're able to undercut competitors by so much, by eliminating most of their cooling costs. They get their power usage efficiency, which is the ratio of IT equipment power consumption versus facility power consumption, under 1.1 for their newer datacentres.

  • Name drop much? (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by bobbied ( 2522392 )

    So we are moving to liquid cooling... You didn't have to do all the name dropping to make your point.

    Buzz words I read in this story: "High performance Computing", "data-crunching", "Cloud computing", "bitcoin", "big data", 3x "bitcoin"..

    BitCoin mining is certainly NOT a good reason to move to liquid cooling and it is not driving innovation in data center construction and design. Anybody building a data center for a mining operation clearly hasn't done the math and *will* loos money, liquid cooled or

  • I don't think the future is immersion cooling... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rahvin112 ( 446269 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @07:04PM (#48568891)

    Frankly I think the future of liquid cooling is the samething used on the desktop just centrally managed pumping and storage. Honestly all these data centers have just been wasting all this heat, and even worse generating more running air conditioners. All that heat has value, pretty high value actually if they were just willing to spend the extra dollars to collect it all. You just set up a industrial park next to your data center, build in some heat transfer systems and offer the waste heat as value add for a bit of $ into whatever medium the customer wants (air, water, etc). In no time at all you will have all sorts of setups that require heat for their industrial use and are happy to pay less than the cost of using gas or electricity and you end up eliminating air conditioning costs and monetizing 20% of electricity use as heat transfer.

    Done right with some proper industrial engineering the system could be relatively maintenance free and rather than spending twice to deal with the heat (paying to generate and paying to cool) you only pay once then monetize the asset you've generated. This is one thing the Scandinavians and Germans have always understood, once you make the heat you might as well use it because it's damned foolish just to waste it. They use waste heat all the time for community driven heating and for all sorts of things and it probably ends up saving all kinds of money.

    • I think such techniques may tend to be highly locale-specific.

      For instance, in desert regions, there's no shortage of waste heat, so the idea of trapping and re-using it elsewhere may not make any sense. In those environments, it's probably much more effective to try to make use of abundant solar resources to offset energy costs used. Liquid cooling make make more sense to try to offset the cooling costs here.

      For data centers in colder climates, you've essentially got a big helping hand from mother nature

      • For instance, in desert regions, there's no shortage of waste heat, so the idea of trapping and re-using it elsewhere may not make any sense.

        Not that this is directly relevant but your comment made me think about something interesting; in Arizona in the Phoenix valley during the summer the water coming in underground pipes heats up so much before it even gets to the house that you don't even need a hot water heater. I have family in Arizona and used to live there; Arizona is hot.

    • You just set up a industrial park next to your data center, build in some heat transfer systems and offer the waste heat as value add for a bit of $ into whatever medium the customer wants (air, water, etc). In no time at all you will have all sorts of setups that require heat for their industrial use

      Very unlikely. What comes out of a data center is diffuse, low grade heat. Maybe useful for running a dehydrator or drying system, maybe replacing building heating systems... but not much more as the tempera

      • Very unlikely. What comes out of a data center is diffuse, low grade heat. Maybe useful for running a dehydrator or drying system, maybe replacing building heating systems... but not much more as the temperature is too low.

        You could run a Stirling engine, perhaps using geothermal (instead of the ambient air) to get a more reasonable temperature differential.

        It's common in Scandinavia because of the climate - but not many people live in that cold of a climate. (The equivalent latitudes in the America's are w

        • Still not going to get much, even Stirlings need a good bit of log-deltaT to work well enough for a ROI.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      As someone living in south florida I can tell you that heat is not valuable.

      You are sort of right but it is temperature differential that is valuable not just heat. In Alaska or Northern Canada 40c water has some value. In Phoenix it is useless most of the year.
      Now if you can get CPUs that are happy at 200c you now have some valuable temperature differential

  • I suspect a liquid [3m.com] future isn't too far off if the price [adorama.com] of 3M Novec [youtu.be] drops just a little bit more

  • The trend in servers seems to be "lousy cooling" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by iamacat ( 583406 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @11:43PM (#48570021)

    There is a realization that with cheapest, lousiest cooling a substantial number of servers may kick the bucket, but replacement costs are still lower that energy costs long term. See this [datacenterknowledge.com] paper for example. Liquid cooling doesn't fit the bill for general computing, although it may for very specialized cases like quantum computers that need to be cooled by liquid helium.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by afidel ( 530433 )

      but replacement costs are still lower that energy costs long term.

      I'm not buying it, my VMWare hosts are pretty large boxes and they've used 630kWhrs since June when they were installed, that comes out to $128/year or so, and that's for primary usage, DX CRAC units have a PUE of ~1.28 which means it costs around $36/year to cool. Even with really cheap servers you'd have to have a LOT of them and have very little effect on AFR to justify it. I'm sure at some scale it makes sense or everyone wouldn't be rese

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