We have interviewed a series of data center operators and suppliers and asked them for their views on the promotion of liquid cooling solutions to mainstream applications.Some of the respondents did not want to disclose the specific applications they used in their data centers and said they viewed the workloads and their cooling methods as a competitive advantage for their companies.
A series of super-sized cloud service operators, including Alphabet, parent companies of Microsoft, Google, Facebook and baidu, have formed a group dedicated to creating an open specification for liquid-cooled server racks, but the group has yet to specify what they will use.However, in these very large scale data centers, at least there is a certain type of workload obviously need to adopt liquid cooling scheme, i.e., by the GPU acceleration machine learning system (or for Google company, is the TPU tensor of the latest processor, which has said publicly that the TPU is now using direct cooling liquid cooling design of chip).
While current corporate data center operators are skeptical and concerned about the use of liquid cooling solutions, some trends are already emerging.If your enterprise supports any of the following workloads in the data center, your data center may also adopt liquid cooling scheme in the future:
1. AI and accelerator
The rate of annual CPU performance growth described by Moore's law has slowed sharply in recent years.This is partly because accelerators (mainly gpus), as well as FPGA and dedicated asics, are increasingly entering enterprise data centers.
Gpu-driven machine learning is probably the most common hardware acceleration use case outside of HPC(high-performance computing).However, in 451 by the market Research institutions Research recently conducted a survey, about a third of IT service provider, said their business plan in the online data mining, analysis and engineering simulation, real-time video and other media, fraud detection, load balancing, and a similar delay sensitive services using the acceleration in the system.
Hardware accelerators have much higher thermal design points (TDP, thermal design points) than cpus, and usually require 200W or more power to cool them.Add a high-performance server CPU, and a single system in your enterprise data center will require more than 1kW of power to cool it.
Intel is also aggressively breaking the 150W limit on its conventionally designed server processors."As more and more corporate customers want more powerful chips, we are starting to see a gradual increase in the amount of watt consumed by these chips.""Said Andy Lawrence, executive director of the Uptime Institute.
The rack density of enterprise data center servers is increasing.Most data centers now have at least some racks over 10kW in their normal operating orbits, while 20 percent of the racks even have 30kW or higher power densities.But these workloads are not considered high performance computing."They just say that their workload has a higher density frame.""Lawrence said.
"If you put the GPU together with Intel's processors, their power density could triple."He said.The liquid cooling scheme is obviously very suitable for these accelerators, especially the immersion cooling scheme, which can cool GPU and CPU.
2. Cooling high-density storage
As the current density of storage in enterprise data centers continues to increase, it may become more difficult to effectively cool storage.Most of the storage capacity installed in the data center is composed of unsealed hard disk drives and cannot be cooled by liquid cooling.Newer technologies, however, offer hope to business users in the industry.For example, solid state drives can be cooled using a full immersion solution.In addition, the creation of high-density, high-speed read/write head helium in the latest generation of storage hardware requires a sealed unit to make it suitable for liquid cooling schemes.
As noted in the 451 Research report, the combination of solid-state and helium-filled hard drives means there is no need to separate air-cooled storage from liquid-cooled processing.The increased reliability of hard drives also has a benefit: immersion in the drive in the coolant can help reduce the impact of heat and humidity on the components.
3. Network edge calculation
The need to reduce current and future application latency further drives the need for a new generation of data centers on the edge of the network.These can be high-density remote facilities deployed in wireless towers, factory operations workshops or retail stores.And these facilities may increasingly host high-density computing hardware, such as GPU packaging clusters for machine learning.
While not all edge data centers are liquid cooling solutions, many edge data centers will be designed to support heavy workloads in confined Spaces that cannot use traditional cooling solutions, or to cool in new deployment environments that do not use traditional preconditions.As a result of reduced energy consumption, liquid cooling makes it easier to deploy marginal sites where there is no large capacity for power.
As many as 20 percent of edge data centers can use liquid cooling, according to Lawrence's estimates.He envisions remote, micromodular, high-density data center sites supporting 40kW per rack.
4. High-frequency trading and blockchain
Many modern financial services firms are computationally intensive, requiring high performance cpus and gpus.These workloads include high frequency trading systems and blockchain based applications such as smart contracts and encrypted currencies.
For example, an enterprise client of GRC (Green Revolution Cooling), a high-frequency trading company, is testing its immersion Cooling solution.When green revolution cooling introduced immersive cooling products for the mining of encrypted currency and the price of bitcoin soared from the end of 2017, the company experienced its biggest ever sales surge.
Peter Poulin, GRC's chief executive, told reporters that another GRC corporate customer in Trinidad and Tobago is running an encrypted currency service at 100kW per rack and connecting a warm water cooling loop to the evaporating tower.Since warm water cooling is more energy efficient than cold water cooling, it can operate in a tropical environment without a mechanical cooler.
5. The cost of traditional cooling scheme is high
When air-based cooling systems cannot cope with high density cooling demands, liquid cooling schemes start to make sense.
Earth science company CGG, for example, using the GRC immersion liquid cooling system, in order to supply the data center in Houston cooling, CGG in the data center is mainly analyses of seismic data processing work, they use on commercial server is a powerful GPU, each frame up to 23 kw power.This power density is relatively high, but it is usually air-cooled.Ted Barragy, senior systems manager at the CGG, said: "we put heavy computing servers in immersion tanks to cool down.But the truth is that this is not so much about meeting the application's workload as about the cost economy of an immersive liquid cooling solution.
In its upgrade process, the immersion liquid cooling scheme replaces the traditional cooling equipment used by CGG's old data center.According to Barragy, the team restored several megawatts of power because of the upgrade."Even after a few years of adding servers and immersion tanks, we still have half a megawatt of unused power."He said."It's an old, traditional data center, and about half of its power is used for inefficient air cooling systems."
Barragy also said the PUE value of the submerged cooling data center was about 1.05.This is more efficient than the company's new but air-cooled data center in Houston, which has a PUE of 1.35.
"A lot of people think that liquid cooling is just a high-density cooling solution that is really suitable for calculating power density of 60kW to 100kW per rack, but it has other significant advantages for our mainstream corporate customers," Poulin said.
Chris Brown, chief technology officer at the Uptime Institute, said they have now seen a general increase in interest in liquid cooling solutions.This is driven by the urgent need of enterprise data centers to achieve higher efficiency and lower operating costs.
"The emphasis on liquid cooling is no longer on ultra-high density, but on solutions that can be used by the average enterprise data center operations manager to cool any IT assets."He said."The solution is now moving into more common density solutions and more common data centers."
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