Datacenter Immersion - The Concept

Legacy datacenter cooling techniques are inherently inefficient. Pumps, fans, blowers, compressors, etc. all consume power often 50% of that consumed by the datacenter. The most efficient datacenters of today use outside air guided to the front of each rack. Even in the absence of primary facility blowers, the fans within each server consume 5-10% of the energy drawn.

Liquid cooling techniques nudging their way into the mainstream capture some portion of the heat generated within the server but at the expense of complexity. They require pumps, tubes, heat exchangers and quick disconnects and most still require some amount of air cooling for secondary devices like memory, ASICS, power transistors, etc.

Immersion cooling can capture ALL the heat generated within a server and transfer it passively to outdoor air or facility water. Immersion requires no ancillary devices. The extracted heat is delivered at a high temperate thus maximizing efficiency and the availability of the heat for other purposes.

For the server designer, airflow considerations are eliminated. The power density is virtually unlimited so that an immersion-cooled server would use far less natural resources (copper, PCB, etc.) and produce less waste.

For More Info See:
P. E. Tuma, The Merits of Open Bath Immersion Cooling of Datacom Equipment, 26th IEEE Semi-Therm Symposium, Santa Clara, CA, February 21-25, 2010.

or E-mail comments to the author for a more detailed presentation.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Immersion
• cooling
• electronics
• datacenter
• data
• center
• greengrid
• green
• fluorinert
• novec
• fluorocarbon
• hydrofluoroether
• fluoroketone
• iceotope
• liquid
• rack
• server
• PUE

[iceotopetv]

Hi Phil,

As you know I think Novec is a great coolant for electronics, however we've found during lab testing that you're better using it for it's convective properties than for phase change.

We discovered that using a phase change coolant creates a gas pocket (from boiling) in front of the electronics that can cause hot spots and thermal runaway.

So using Novec coolant with a higher boiling point, it's fluidity and large expansion from heat make it ultra-convect.

[nxadmon]

There are too many problems with a design like this. Things to consider are specialized equipment, how easy is it to change something, how easy is it to manage. I think your more likely to see computers in bags with hoses going in and out rather then huge dunking systems.

[ebempemp]

Congratulations on your "Best Paper Award" on this concept at SemiTherm 2010.

Very interesting idea. I heard some good discussions on this; who do you think will be the first to deploy a working full-scale system?