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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

#91

Post by dsp »

VorpalWay wrote: post #71

I never looked into this, but why would a datacenter consume water for cooling in the first place? Sure, they use some. But just like you fill up the cooling loop in a car, once it is there it just circulates between the heat source and radiators and/or heat exchangers, with perhaps some minimal top off needed (since flexible tubing isn't 100% water proof). Or are they for some unfathomable reason using evaporative c…

It’s very efficient. The net electrical energy saved using the latent heat of water is 30 to 100+ times greater than the energy required to desalinate or wastewater recycle the same volume of water.

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

#92

Post by Animats »

pixel_popping wrote: post #10
qsxfthnkp2322 wrote: post #6

Claude write good. Nvidia has so much money and they can’t afford to pay a human for a day of their time to write a blog post?

I feel that the sad reality is that most blogs in the future will be addressed to AI and not humans, it's gonna be quite rare to read directly something as we will have built-in tools within browser and phone and OS and so-on that always rewrite on-demand based on current expertise, wanted tone and so-on. There is a recent study I believe that demonstrated that AIs digest better articles made by AI, which means that…

We're there. The recent HN article about the Fender Stratocaster had some content from a Fender press release, which was regurgitating text from a legal aggregation site. It was, overall, bad coverage of the area of copyright on decorative but useful objects.[1]

Watch for cases where content has been through two layers of LLMs. It's not good.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48665916

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

#93

Post by loeg »

Groxx wrote: post #80
VorpalWay wrote: post #71

I never looked into this, but why would a datacenter consume water for cooling in the first place? Sure, they use some. But just like you fill up the cooling loop in a car, once it is there it just circulates between the heat source and radiators and/or heat exchangers, with perhaps some minimal top off needed (since flexible tubing isn't 100% water proof). Or are they for some unfathomable reason using evaporative c…

(ab)using fresh water in vast quantities is cheaper. currently. and also more energy efficient, because evaporating water away takes a lot of energy with it. you have to raise radiators to a higher temperature to keep up with that, or have much more surface area.

There's just a lot of fresh water almost anywhere you'd want to site a DC. In places where water is more expensive, obviously it doesn't make sense.

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

#94

Post by hiddencost »

bozhark wrote: post #84
derac wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the unfathomable reason is that it is significantly more energy efficient.

Then it’s not being measured adequately. The loss of material must be included If water is evaporated or spent out of the system.. it is not more efficient

Companies will never price in externalities unless they are forced to.

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

#95

Post by loeg »

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…

On-site natural gas turbines at a handful of DCs are genuinely loud. In general I agree that DCs are mostly fine neighbors, but maybe louder power plants aren't.

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

#96

Post by quickthrowman »

bozhark wrote: post #86
1e1a wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they are using evaporative cooling.

But you can do that in a closed system and recapture the water

You cannot have evaporative cooling without evaporating some water into the atmosphere.

A closed circuit cooling tower still has water spraying onto the closed loop process water heat exchanger coil and mixing with atmospheric air to evaporate and cool the process water indirectly instead of evaporating and recirculating the process water that doesn’t evaporate directly like in an open-loop cooling tower.

I suppose you could condense the evaporated water somehow by using a chilled umbrella or some other ridiculous contraption above the cooling tower, but why would you do that?

FWIW I sell and run commercial electrical work, primarily to mechanical contractors who are installing boilers, chillers, cooling towers, and pumps. I spend my professional life immersed in this type of equipment.

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

#97

Post by RachelF »

why_at wrote: post #72

Maybe I'm being dumb, but I don't understand what the innovation is here. I get that they're using liquid coolant at higher than usual temperatures, but why couldn't they do that before? Most of the comparison in the article is for air cooled datacenters but what about other liquid cooled ones? Surely in all the previous datacenters that have been designed there has been someone doing the math and determining what te…

The "innovation" is that everything is now attached to a watercooled block.

The rest is marketing: The Cray supercomputer were fluid cooled back in the 1980's, the entire board had an inert liquid flowing across it.

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

#98

Post by danstiner »

bozhark wrote: post #84
derac wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the unfathomable reason is that it is significantly more energy efficient.

Then it’s not being measured adequately. The loss of material must be included If water is evaporated or spent out of the system.. it is not more efficient

It is more efficient, in terms of cost the datacenter owner pays per unit of heat extracted. Water is cheap in places this is being done, relative to amount of heat vaporization can carry off.

You can certainly argue DCs should pay more for water than other uses, but who gets to decide what is a good vs bad use of water? Pricing in externalities is tricky, and water usage rights are especially complicated. I don't know what a good&fair solution is.

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

#99

Post by shagie »

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…

Of old... https://web.archive.org/web/20210115152829/https://www.nrel....

It's got a "heat energy to/from campus" exchange in there.

That's a link in March and the air temperature was 31°F.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210708150410/https://www.nrel.... is later with air temperature of 68°F.

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

#100

Post by quickthrowman »

bozhark wrote: post #83
rnxrx wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s usually open loop - closed loop, so closed loop goes through CRACs or liquid cooled equipment manifolds. That heated water circulates through an heat exchanger on the roof that uses open loop cooling to shed the heat to the surrounding environment.

How inefficient

It uses almost half as much electricity, it’s way more efficient than air cooled chillers by themselves.

East of the 100 degree W line of longitude, there is more than enough water to use evaporative cooling if needed.

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