New Tech Keeps Data Centers Cool in Warm Climates
Hot water from some computers drives the refrigeration of others
' ... the Regensburg system uses the heat to power an adsorption chiller and provide them—or other computers in the data center—with extra frostiness. iDataCool’s key innovation of iDataCool is its low-cost, custom-designed copper heat sink, through which the water flows, drawing away heat. The processor heat sink is hard-soldered to a copper pipeline with flowing water, which is attached to heat sinks affixed to other components in the system, such as memory and voltage controllers. The energy from all this hot water goes to drive the adsorption chiller, which operates efficiently when the water entering is above 65°C. The chiller produces cold water that feeds a separate cooling loop in the data center. External coolers that would be attached to this loop in other setups could thus be completely replaced by the adsorption chiller.
Though the adsorption chiller works best at temperatures above 65°C, the processors themselves consume less power at lower temperatures. So in operation, the processors consumed 5 percent more power than is ideal. However, that extra wattage was more than offset by the 90 percent improvement in the adsorption chiller’s efficiency. With the system in place, the energy recovered from iDataCool was about 25 percent of what would have been lost. Auweter has seen the iDataCool firsthand and thinks it is a well-conceived system. “To be honest, I think...they’re actually really addressing all the important issues of higher-temperature cooling,” he says.
Wettig says the team did not encounter any major problems after installing the system, but he did admit there was one flaw that could be fixed. “We lose a lot of heat to the air of the computing center” because the server racks are poorly insulated, he says. According to the researchers’ projections, with better thermal insulation about 50 percent of the total waste energy could be recovered.
Hot-water cooling and energy reuse is still considered a novel solution for high-performance computers, but Auweter genuinely believes that this is the best option out there, especially for supercomputers installed in warmer climes. The biggest deterrent against adoption, he says, is the fear of having to put up a little more money for a system that still isn’t widely used. “When it comes to spending lots of money, people tend to get very conservative and stick to proven technologies. In our case, that would mean they stick to air cooling,” says Auweter. “But I think it’s just crucial to have reference to setups of systems like iDataCool, so those people can think beyond the current state of the art or just to demonstrate that the risk is not actually as high as they might think.” '
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