Greenwashing, that's all. This is not going to be the standard it's just a light house project to calm some nerves to keep on going.
45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
101–110 of 450 posts
Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
#102Maybe 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.
My partner lamented the same thing... Cray was doing this 40+ years ago
Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
#103Earlier 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?
If the outdoor temperature is cool enough (maybe 30C?), you just pipe the liquid outside through a large enough loop or heat exchanger to get it back down to under 45C. Even better if you can put the loop in a lake and dump the heat there (maybe not better from an ecological POV though). The pumps moving all that liquid becomes the noisiest component.
Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
#104> 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.
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Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
#105Earlier 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
>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,…
How dare those nasty, dirty, unemployed live their lives under likely desperate circumstance. They are so much worse than corrupt oligarchs pumping and dumping their way into the greed hall of fame.
Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
#106This 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? I live at 4th and Brannan and there was one just off 3rd and Brannan in San Francisco. It was shut down when hosting.com sold it off but I didn't notice it while walking by then and I don't notice it while walking by now.
My GPUs at Hurricane Electric in Fremont are also completely unnoticeable outside the building. Inside, when I'm working at the cabinets it's obviously deafening. Outside you wouldn't even know. Realistically, the predominant sounds at my home are from the traffic on the Bay Bridge so it's nice when there's congestion because it's quiet.
Honestly, I wish there were more urban datacenters. It's getting quite annoying having to make a 1 hr trek to Fremont every time I want to rack a new server.
Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, but the heat will still likely need boosting by about a further 10 degrees either at the source or end user. DC inlet is 45°C, outlet is 55°C assuming a 10°C ΔT. By the time that's travelled 500m–1km through pipework you've lost a few degrees, so you're arriving at the HIU at maybe 50–52°C. The home radiator circuit then takes that down by around say 12°C, returning ~38°C. Factor in pipe losses on the return leg…
>Factor in pipe losses on the return leg and you're back at the data centre with maybe 35°C inlet rather than 45°C
Surely having the input fluid being colder is a benefit, not a problem? Just run the fluid more slowly through the system?
Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah this is it. You can make really nice datacenters that are basically quiet and environmentally perfect.
This was never in dispute.
But that is not how corporations roll. They want the cheapest shit that they can get away with. No regulations only corruption. Which is middle of nowhere America.
Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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,…
> we've been expected to put up with the much more annoying urban traffic noise for decades just fine? For one, there tends to be little traffic at night when most people want quiet in order to sleep. Driving is also something (nearly) everyone does and benefits directly from, so negative externalities are easier to accept. It is much harder to accept a new source of noise near your home you haven't asked for and don…
> Driving is also something (nearly) everyone does and benefits directly from, so negative externalities are easier to accept.
This reads a little too close to driving being an inherently good thing or some sort of objective requirement, but it's only that way in certain urban places because the built environment makes it as arduous as possible to do those things without.
Something that pisses me off about many urban places that don't even otherwise require people to drive, is that many who do use their cars the most often have their neighborhoods protected from the noise they contribute to everywhere else. This whole thing of putting apartments only where there's already the most disgusting car-infested thoroughfares; "sorry, can't have an apartment one street in off the main drag, that's only for bungalows! Don't like it? Get richer. Excuse me while I drive through your bedroom and park for free in front."
Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah this is it. You can make really nice datacenters that are basically quiet and environmentally perfect. This was never in dispute. But that is not how corporations roll. They want the cheapest shit that they can get away with. No regulations only corruption. Which is middle of nowhere America.
And if they put them in the middle of nowhere, I don't see why there's a problem.
What I don't understand is putting these things in populated areas.