The application of the data center liquid cooling system will heat up again

Committed to the liquid cooling system of the Danish manufacturer Asetek company announced that will work with partners a heavyweight, and made major progress was made in its data center operations, but it didn't disclose the name of the partners.

In an interview with bloomberg, CEO Andre Eriksen said, "the development of data centers has great potential.
In the long run, I believe that the mainstream cooling technology of the data center will be liquid cooling."
The identity of Asetek's partners remains a mystery, but some experts believe it could be chipmaker Intel.
For Asetek, this is a business growth opportunity, and the company's stock performance is impressive.
Compared with a pre-tax loss of $600,000 in the first half of 2016, Asetek's revenue rose 20% in the second quarter of 2017.
Overall, Asetek's data center business generated $1.4 million in revenue in the first half of 2017, compared with $21 million for direct liquid cooling products.
In addition, the company has been working with some data center customers, including licensing its technology to Fujitsu and Penguin Computing.
Asetek's strongest rival is CoolIT Systems, a Canadian manufacturer.
The two are the largest direct liquid-cooling suppliers in the industry, as well as the high-end PC (mainly used for gaming) and DLC (data center liquid cooling) technology vendors in the data center.
The two companies use liquid cooling technology based on water cooling.
There is a difference in how to allocate warm water, but the technology is broadly similar.
In June 2015, a local court in northern California, SAN jose, ruled that CoolIT systems had to pay $1.9 million to Asetek for patent infringement.
CoolIT has also recently partnered with well-known manufacturers.
Last June, the company announced a partnership with dell EMC to integrate its technology into dell's PowerEdge server.
The tie-up is notable because dell EMC has been reluctant to use direct liquid cooling technology (although it developed the DLC system for eBay in 2016).
In 2016, CoolIT also announced a partnership with server manufacturer HPE to provide cooling for HPE's Apollo 2000 system.
HPE also developed the DLC system for Apollo 8000 for high-performance computing in 2014.
These collaborations indicate that, although both server oems have developed their own DLC systems, they are ultimately in technical cooperation with CoolIT.
CoolIT also has a partnership with Stulz, a German firm that is one of the world leaders in data center cooling systems.
The two companies recently collaborated on a micromodule data center called STULZ Micro DC.
The micromodule data center is designed for high performance computing (HPC), and its independent unit can be supported with a power density of 80kW per frame.
But CoolIT is not Asetek's only market competitor.
Other makers of cold board systems include Chilldyne, a california-based company.
The company is smaller than CoolIT or Asetek, but it has also been successful recently and is working on a project for DARPA.
Although warm water and cold plate technology are more flexible, it is relatively easy to refit in the existing data center, but its cooling efficiency is lower than that of immersion liquid cooling technology.
The makers of immersing liquid Cooling technologies include Iceotope in the UK, Green Revolution Cooling (GRC), LiquidCool systems, and the recently marketed Dutch Asperitas company.
Immersion techniques have some advantages on cold plates, which are much higher because they capture server heat loads in a liquid.
This means that devices using immersion cooling servers can replace expensive mechanical air cooling systems, and only use dry coolers or other low-cost cooling technologies.
Artificial intelligence promotes the development of DLC technology
However, the market competition between DLC suppliers appears to be in vain.
For most DLC vendors, the real competitors are the traditional cooling vendors of data centers.
That may be changing, however.
The growth of intensive learning and artificial intelligence related computation-intensive applications may lead to greater market demand for direct liquid cooling technologies other than traditional HPC.
Chilldyne says that while its technology supports a range of CPU processors, most of its products are for GPU systems.
For example, the company recently provided Korean manufacturers with a 350kW system to cool 132 servers equipped with 1056 AMD r9290x GPU.
"The DLC allows a set of 5kW racks and another 60kW rack to work well," said Steve Harrington, chief technology officer at Chilldyne.
Traditional air conditioners are hard to support.
The use of a backdoor heat exchanger technology may also allow this to cool, but it is also limited.
He said the DLC's cooling capabilities also meant that some customers could use the consumer-grade GPU to implement HPC applications.
Usually this is a problem because these devices will overheat, but liquid cooling can prevent this."
"He added.
Direct liquid cooling market demand is growing.
UK data center operators Virtus, chief executive of Neil Cresswell recently announced in a London suburb construction power capacity of 90 mw data center park, and said, DLC technology applying in the near future to more data center hosting facility.
Tate Cantrell, chief technology officer at Verne Global, an Icelandic data center provider, said he expects more customers to want to deploy DLC systems in the future.
We do not require liquid-cooling technology in the data center industry, but if liquid cooling is necessary, many of our customers using supercomputers are using liquid cooling technology."
He said.
In addition, Chinese cloud computing operators baidu and alibaba are also investing in the use of DLC technology to support the artificial intelligence they use.
In addition, the demand for systems such as CoolIT and the Stulz microdata center is expected to increase, as the application of the Internet of things will also use liquid cooling technology for more demand for edge computing.
Asetek will announce the names of its partners in the SC17 HPC event in Denver in November and show other developments in its direct liquid cooling technology.