Liquid and immersion is the new cool at Supercomputing '22 It's safe to say liquid cooling was a hot topic at the Supercomputing Conference in Dallas this week. As far as the eye could see, the exhibition hall was packed with liquid-cooled servers, oil-filled immersion cooling tanks, and all the fittings, pumps, and coolant distribution units (CDUs) you might need to deploy the tech …
Nobody yet loves ARM _enough_ to build a supercomputer out of ARM cores - and even then, supercomputing is its own strange world.
If you've got a weather forecasting model cranking on PB of stored data, you need grunt processors to do the number crunching - it's not like VMs and webhosting where you can get away with some level of underprovisioning / overselling based on bandwidth used - _all_ your customers don't turn up at once :)
Unless you go squishy with organic computers there's not a lot you can do about it. No matter how clever the design a transistor is going to use some energy and thus get a bit warm, no problem for something with just a few transistors but when you cram billions of them into a square centimetre or so things are going to get toasty. Speed also matters you could slow the clock rate to reduce the heat generated but that sort of defeats the whole point of the exercise.
> Are they also nonflammable / incombustible fluids ? Asking for a friend's PTSD...
1-methoxyheptafluoropropane is Non-flammable, 100% ozone friendly, Non-corrosive, High electrical resistivity of about 10^11 Ω·m (roughly the same as glass). Boiling Point (@ 1 atm) 34°C (93.2°F). Freeze Point. -122°C (-187.6°F). Sold as 3M Novec 7000 Engineered Fluid.
Hydrofluoroethers are nearly all Non-flammable, their one big downside is the special handling required when eventually being disposed. This typically requires the product being shipped back to the manufactures and for them to handle all legal, environmental and safety requirements when dealing with poisonous by-produced like hydrogen fluoride (search for images of "hydrogen fluoride burns", but do it after lunch) and carbonyl fluoride produced during extreme heat thermal decomposition.
Everything old is new again. Liquid (freon, water) cooling was supplanted by air that is being supplanted by liquid (various) cooling. Vector processors have been supplanted by GPUs that are vector processors. RISC once ruled and economics put CISC in the driver seat - but ARM is starting to wave. Big whoopee on all this 'new stuff'.
I tend to say that since 1991 and the invention of the WWW, computing industry has stopped innovation. Since 30 years I can't think of a single new "technology ". Mouse, open-source, windows, Internet, databases, 2D pixel-based screens, RAM, processors ... really, what has changed fundamentally from the Macintosh or Windows 3.1 or HPUX CDE ?
Why are Facebook and Twitter and Amazon called "tech industry " ? What's so much high-tech about an ad-broker or postal retail store with catalogue ?
Sounds a great idea! We could even build a datacentre and put it in space and, as there's only radiative cooling, we could use this old-fangled liquid cooling and radiators. Shouldn't cost more than several hundreds of millions of dollars to get a couple of tons of liquid coolant and associated pumps, radiators etc into space. A few hundreds of millions more for flight hardened infrastructure and comms. My fag packet says I can have the current equivalent of a £200K, fully maintainable datacentre running in space, with no possibility of maintenance or upgrade and a limited 5-year life, for only about £1.5bn (including research and testing down the pub). In reality all we have to do is rent a Starlink box to bounce the signals, do all the data storage in an anonymous rented AWS data warehouse in Venezuela, tell people it's the thing in space doing the work and bingo, mucho profitorolo!
Oops, I almost feel like I've seriously undercut an ESA proposal ... who's in?
Apart from the one mention of the Microsoft experiment, very little about heat / energy recovery - and I assume that's on the floor, rather than the lack of coverage in the article.
Some people are missing opportunities to innovate. Oh, no, wait... let someone else innovate and then steal it! Better,
Where I used to work we handled equipment leased out by IBM.
We received a pallet of some pretty expensive servers that someone had gotten the bright idea to liquid cool with some kind of oil. The things were literally dripping with the stuff.
Now our job was to receive the equipment, record it's condition, and then get it ready for resale... that could be anything from a full refurb to as good or better than new condition to scrap it.
There was no way we could clean those servers, they were scrapped and someone got a BIG bill.
Of course if it's something designed for immersion cooling that's different, but these were standard 1U servers.
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