Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blogs.nvidia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 450 posts

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

#121

Post by toast0 »

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…

> Surely in all the previous datacenters that have been designed there has been someone doing the math and determining what temperature things need to run at, how much energy it will use, how much heat it all will produce, etc.

It seemed like a pretty big deal ~ 2011 when big companies were running their (air cooled) datacenters closer to 95F (35C) vs the traditional 72F (22C). So jumping up a little more is maybe not super exciting, but it's still innovation.

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

#122

Post by toast0 »

arjie wrote: post #106
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

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 k…

> Honestly, I wish there were more urban datacenters.

There's a lot of them in high rise buildings... but they come with high rise rent.

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

#123

Post by taneq »

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…

Is this not how it was already done? Huh.

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

#124

Post by gleenn »

toast0 wrote: post #121
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…

> Surely in all the previous datacenters that have been designed there has been someone doing the math and determining what temperature things need to run at, how much energy it will use, how much heat it all will produce, etc. It seemed like a pretty big deal ~ 2011 when big companies were running their (air cooled) datacenters closer to 95F (35C) vs the traditional 72F (22C). So jumping up a little more is maybe no…

And the fact that their system doesn't dump water. I think that is actually perhaps the bigger deal. Datacenters have been getting a lot of heat (pun intended) for using significant fresh water at the expense of local municipalities.

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

#125

Post by taneq »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #120
loeg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to design your hardware to tolerate being run in consistently hotter conditions. There's a tradeoff between cooling cost and failure rate / capex.

Nvidia's automotive and aerospace variants get ratings up to 85C, for comparison.

Don’t their consumer GPUs run at 85C core temp? Maybe not for as long though.

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

#126

Post by prng2021 »

“That unlocks something beyond energy savings: the possibility of eliminating water consumption entirely.”

They’ve made this claim numerous times in the article and I really don’t understand it. The building has tons of water being recirculated through it. That water came from somewhere in the surrounding natural world. How is that 0 water consumption?

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

#127

Post by briandw »

fennec-posix wrote: post #102
RachelF wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cray used Fluorinert, a chlorofluorocarbon. So not exactly a environmentally friendly solution.

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

#128

Post by danans »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #115
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…

Evaporative cooling is practically a cooling cheat code. Why unfathomable? What's more efficient?

Not more efficient at heat dissipation, but radiative cooling panels can achieve sub-ambient dissipation in conditions (like high humidity) that evaporative cooling performance declines in, and with no water consumption.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13594...

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

#129

Post by frollogaston »

gleenn wrote: post #124
toast0 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely in all the previous datacenters that have been designed there has been someone doing the math and determining what temperature things need to run at, how much energy it will use, how much heat it all will produce, etc. It seemed like a pretty big deal ~ 2011 when big companies were running their (air cooled) datacenters closer to 95F (35C) vs the traditional 72F (22C). So jumping up a little more is maybe no…

And the fact that their system doesn't dump water. I think that is actually perhaps the bigger deal. Datacenters have been getting a lot of heat (pun intended) for using significant fresh water at the expense of local municipalities.

Closed-loop water cooling chips is nothing new. There are two separate water systems that often get conflated*. The loop warms up the water, which is recycled but first needs to be cooled externally somehow. Normally they use evaporative cooling towers that do use water, or chillers that don't use water but use more energy. But they're claiming they can get that water loop so much hotter than the outdoor environment that active cooling isn't needed. They attribute this to improving the chip-to-water interaction.

Even air-cooled datacenters work somewhat the same way, but instead of water to chips, it's air. The air goes into hot aisles then exchanges heat with water, after which, see above.

* Other datacenter marketing materials talk about how they have a "closed loop system that uses no water" and they do still use water in the evap towers. I was half expecting this article to be that again, glad it wasn't.

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

#130

Post by vkou »

prng2021 wrote: post #126

“That unlocks something beyond energy savings: the possibility of eliminating water consumption entirely.” They’ve made this claim numerous times in the article and I really don’t understand it. The building has tons of water being recirculated through it. That water came from somewhere in the surrounding natural world. How is that 0 water consumption?

After filling the tanks once, subsequent draw would be zero. Most data centers currently use evaporative cooling - where they pull tons of water in, and then... Let it evaporate.

Imagine a residential building that reclaims and reprocesses and purifies 100% of all the water it uses. This would be dramatically more difficult and better than the status quo, and would be called 'net zero' by any sensible accounting method.

---

Obviously, evaporative cooling is net-zero water use when accounted across the entire globe (the water falls as rain, somewhere, eventually), but it is net-negative for a local community.

Post reply on HN