Single Phase Liquid Immersion Cooling Systems with GRC
On Thursday, August 31, Ben Smith, Chief Product Officer of Green Revolution Cooling (GRC), gave a hybrid Lunch and Learn presentation with the Society of HPC Professionals in the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) on the University of Texas at Austin campus, discussing how GRC’s Single Phase Liquid Immersion systems are cooling today’s data centers.
The field of high-performance computing is rapidly evolving with new, ground-breaking server and chip technology. However, the question is: how will modern data centers’ traditional air cooling systems keep up with this increased demand for power and energy consumption? GRC delivers one solution to that challenge – Single Phase Liquid Immersion Cooling.
Based on testing and analysis on 400W CPUs, immersion cooling is expected to cool chips that demand an even higher thermal design power (TDP), likely pushing past the boundary of 1000W as techniques advance. Smith discussed the different workarounds to increase max TDP of baseline, air-cooled mainframes, such as utilizing engineered heatsinks or targeted flow enhancements to increase cooling capabilities.
While present-day claims of liquid immersion cooling set a limit on the thermal density of fluids, actual testing by third parties shows that thermal resistance decreases at higher TDP. Smith goes into further technical detail about GRC’s testing data, validating the significance of immersion.
Touching on the future of data center cooling, Smith notes that some servers on the current market are being purposefully constructed for immersion and predicts a hybrid immersion directed-chip technology.
After the presentation, participating attendees took a tour around the TACC supercomputing facility, which has a mix of different systems using various cooling approaches.