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45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

blogs.nvidia.com

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Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#51

Post by wasabi991011 »

asdff wrote: post #41
dgellow wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A datacenter is about data. Your network of space router is in no way something a reasonable person would consider a datacenter... Even less an inference datacenter.

Why, because on board storage is too small and the compute nodes are underpowered? And that can't ever change? A reasonable person doesn't understand technology usually. That is increasingly an understanding left to the wizard class. I mean people make clusters out of raspberry pis and minipcs.

> Why, because on board storage is too small and the compute nodes are underpowered?

Yes

> And that can't ever change?

It can, but but not for free. As the comment earlier in the thread was referring to, more computing power needs more cooling, and cooling in space is hard.

> A reasonable person doesn't understand technology usually.

What? Do you mean a layperson? Why does that matter when discussing the feasibility of space-based AI datacenters?

> That is increasingly an understanding left to the wizard class.

No, you can get there with a bachelor's degree in a relevant subject. Or just reading informative news sources.

> I mean people make clusters out of raspberry pis and minipcs.

So? What does that have to do with anything?

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#52

Post by notrealyme123 »

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #50

> In favorable climates, NVIDIA’s 45-degree liquid-cooling architecture .... What's a favorable climate, apart from, obviously, Greenland? The piece is a little light on details on the correlation between outside temperatures and efficiency & cost. It'd be nice to see even a broad-strokes discussion of that.

The university where i studied uses high temperature cooling since a few years. The weather on Germany ranges to quite high temperatures, but according to the tech stuff they only need active (as in AC) cooling for the higher end of the 30 degrees. The technology is quite fascinating.

https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2024_038_kit-supercompute...

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#53

Post by joe_mamba »

ramon156 wrote: post #18
amluto wrote: post #12

This opens up an interesting synergy: district heating. 45C is low but not unworkable for a district heating loop, and a data center might be able to make a nice pitch to a community if the data center offers to provide heat to a district heating system for free. This brings the value to the local community of a nearby datacenter up from near zero to potentially a few million dollars per year. Summer is still an issu…

Do you live near a datacenter? Property value goes down, constant humming.. the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating

>Do you live near a datacenter? Property value goes down, constant humming

I don't live next to one but I'd take constant humming over the constant stop/go traffic noise, honking, squeaky brakes, slamming doors and revving engines I now have on my western side of the apartment, thanks to the unemployment office the city opened on my street not too long ago.

So how come constant humming is somehow an illegal nuisance, but we've been expected to put up with the much more annoying urban traffic noise for decades just fine?

My parents apartment have constant humming anyway thanks to the HVAC system on the roof of the nearby supermarket and white/brown noise is far more tolerable and easy to tune out than traffic noises.

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#54

Post by mixdup »

amluto wrote: post #29
ramon156 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you live near a datacenter? Property value goes down, constant humming.. the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating

I’ve been to datacenters, but not the huuuge ones people seem to talk about in the context of AI. They are noisy inside (due to air cooling, which is largely avoided by the tech in the OP), but they’re entirely unremarkable outside compared to any other commercial or industrial building. Computers are not inherently loud, nor is power conversion. Power plants are all over, even in populated areas. They’re not so bad…

>There is no fundamental reason that datacenters need to be especially unpleasant to their neighbors.

Sure there is, being a good neighbor costs more than being a bad neighbor

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#55

Post by michaelt »

skybrian wrote: post #23
ramon156 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you live near a datacenter? Property value goes down, constant humming.. the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating

It sounds like with this liquid cooling, they won’t need the fans?

Some systems use liquid cooling for the GPU and CPU, but air cooling for the PSU, RAM and SSDs.

With that said, by the standards of industrial sites data centres are quiet, low traffic and smell free. An industrial area that can’t build a data centre certainly can’t build a steelworks or oil refinery or leather tannery.

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#56

Post by matt-p »

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #50

> In favorable climates, NVIDIA’s 45-degree liquid-cooling architecture .... What's a favorable climate, apart from, obviously, Greenland? The piece is a little light on details on the correlation between outside temperatures and efficiency & cost. It'd be nice to see even a broad-strokes discussion of that.

Yeah, this is part of the issue to be honest. You'd need outdoor air to be below ~37°C to guarantee 45°C water outlet temperature. In most locations you still need cooling towers or compressors some of the time, so you still have to build all the infrastructure that comes with them; though reducing their use is still great, saving serious amounts of water or energy.

For e.g you might think of the outskirts of London as fairly moderate, but this week it's been hot enough that supplemental cooling would likely have been needed at points. For a data centre here you'd typically design the cooling system to cope with outdoor temps in excess of 40°C, which is not a conservative number anymore.

Also, while Nvidia might be happy with you supplying water at 45°C I suspect you will get better longevity of the hardware at lower temps like say 35°C. GPUs are expensive, and extending longevity may well be 'worth' a bit more water or energy to you. In practice you are also likely to have air cooled systems that sit 'beside' the AI compute like storage severs, any extra CPU compute and network switches. So you are likely to need a separate room and cooling system for that. Great progress though.

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#58

Post by uberex »

amluto wrote: post #12

This opens up an interesting synergy: district heating. 45C is low but not unworkable for a district heating loop, and a data center might be able to make a nice pitch to a community if the data center offers to provide heat to a district heating system for free. This brings the value to the local community of a nearby datacenter up from near zero to potentially a few million dollars per year. Summer is still an issu…

45 is the cool temp so they could send the community a higher temp water to their heat exchanger?

Then 45 or below is sent back on the return.

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#59

Post by metabagel »

The NASA Ames Research Center Modular Supercomputing Facility is highly efficient, both in terms of electricity and water use. The facility isn't air conditioned. The chips are water cooled, and the inlet water temperature is pretty high I believe - I think it's 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/ames/doing-more-...

https://www.nas.nasa.gov/assets/nas/pdf/ModularSupercomputin...

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#60

Post by kayo_20211030 »

notrealyme123 wrote: post #52
kayo_20211030 wrote: post #50

> In favorable climates, NVIDIA’s 45-degree liquid-cooling architecture .... What's a favorable climate, apart from, obviously, Greenland? The piece is a little light on details on the correlation between outside temperatures and efficiency & cost. It'd be nice to see even a broad-strokes discussion of that.

The university where i studied uses high temperature cooling since a few years. The weather on Germany ranges to quite high temperatures, but according to the tech stuff they only need active (as in AC) cooling for the higher end of the 30 degrees. The technology is quite fascinating. https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2024_038_kit-supercompute...

I lived in Munich many years ago, but if the temperature ever went to the high thirties for more than a day we'd expect the end of the world :-)
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