20 miles west of Portland, engineers at an Intel lab immerse expensive server racks “in a transparent bath” of petrochemicals similar to motor oil, reports the Oregonian, where the servers “take on a greenish tinge as they silently perform normal computing tasks.” .
Intel’s underwater computers work like they’re on a dry server rack because they’re not submerged, even if they appear to be. They are bathed in a synthetic oil that does not conduct electricity. Computers don’t break.
In fact, they thrive because liquid absorbs the heat from hard-working computers much better than air. For the same reason, placing a hot pot in water will cool it much faster than leaving it on the stove.
As data centers become more powerful, computers generate so much heat that cooling them consumes excessive amounts of energy. Cooling systems can use as much electricity as the computers themselves. Intel and other big tech companies are developing liquid-cooling systems that could use far less electricity, hoping to cut data center energy costs by a third while reducing the facilities’ impact on the climate reduce. This is a radical rethink for data centers, which already account for 2% of all electricity consumption in the United States…
Skeptics warn of the difficulty or prohibitive cost of converting existing data centers to liquid cooling. Proponents of the change, including Intel, say a transition is imperative to meet growing power hunger in data centers. “The energy crisis and the need for global climate action are beginning to take hold,” said Jen Huffstetler, product sustainability manager at Intel…
Cooler computers can be clustered more tightly in data centers because they don’t require space for airflow. Computer manufacturers can pack chips closer together on the motherboard, enabling more computing power in the same space. Finally, liquid cooling could significantly reduce the environmental and economic costs of data centers. Traditional evaporative data center cooling systems require large amounts of water and large amounts of electricity…
Many other technology companies also support immersion cooling. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are all helping to fund immersion cooling research in the state of Oregon… It might finally be time for data center operators to ditch air cooling in favor of a much more efficient solution. Intel’s Ms. Huffstetler said she expects liquid cooling to become mainstream within the next three to five years.
Source: The Oregonian
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See also
Immersion cooling for data center servers is no longer just for hyperscalers or HPC, RNT Rausch wants to extend it to businesses of all sizes
Microsoft is accelerating its plans to make its data centers less “thirsty,” adopting two-stage immersion cooling that doesn’t require water
Following the success of the Natick project, which deployed autonomous servers in the sea, Microsoft is now immersing its servers in liquid baths to improve their performance and efficiency
According to Microsoft, its underwater data center passed the test, uses energy sustainably and can reduce latency by bringing cloud services closer to customers