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

161–170 of 450 posts

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

#161

Post by dgacmu »

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?

As someone else noted - it's effectively zero compared to the water evaporated in evaporative chillers.

But it's still misleading. The major source of water use in datacenters, by _far_, is the water used in power generation. This improves PUE, which reduces power draw, but the savings are almost certainly under about 20% given that many modern datacenters already operate at a PUE of under 1.2. So if you're running on coal or gas, you're still consuming quite a bit of water indirectly.

Now that said again - the water consumption part of this equation is generally overhyped. The power draw is the problem, as are the really bad temporary hacks to the power problem (e.g., what x.ai is doing with "temporary" gas turbines).

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

#162

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

RachelF wrote: post #97
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.

When my grandpa retired from Monsanto chemical back in the 90s, I helped him clean out his office and got a tour of a bunch of stuff.

He showed me their Cray, which had its own dedicated computer room, and they set it up with the coolant pump and fountain unit right in the middle in front of a glass wall facing the hallway so everyone could gawk at it.

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

#164

Post by jrnichols »

arjie wrote: post #160
toast0 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Imagine if one of the amenities in a high-end residential building could be a cabinet haha! That would be amazing. Doesn't make economic sense, but I'd love it. Would love to explain that to my wife. "I know that one has the pool, but we can rack my servers in this one if we live there".

Something here about water usage, a small data center, and a swimming pool. Combining the three may either be awesome or tragic!

I like this idea. A small cage in an apartment complex would be a huge selling point.

Or even a La La Land on the corner, urban DC in the back. Winning across the board.

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

#166

Post by blondie9x »

In a way does this study try to detract from the public backlash against datacenters?

Look at the author of the blog.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/author/joshparker/

Is this NVIDIA lawyer trying to influence the public perception of datacenter for his company?

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

#167

Post by SkyPuncher »

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…

Heat pumps can effectively bring that temp up higher.

The problem is really how much energy is actually available.

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

#168

Post by majormajor »

annzabelle wrote: post #157
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 grew up in Northern Virginia, (of AWS US-East-1, MAE-East, and Equinix fame), where there are more data centers than anywhere else in the world, and I never heard organized opposition to them until the last couple of years. They were mainly viewed as a way for Loudoun County to build their industrial tax base without the downsides of having industrial workers, and allowed them to consistently lower property taxes w…

The new gen of AI-boom-construction datacenters seem to be substantially different than the ones I used to go when working at companies whose software ran inside them. Those were running air-cooled rack servers, which is a whole different world from these things. The couple of the new gen I've seen have been much larger and much more turbine-happy.

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

#169

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

There's never been a reason a sealed water-cooled system ever had to use vast amounts of water. But State Of The Art wound up being using and expelling the water. It seems like data centers operate like other industrial enterprises - locate in the city/county/state that gives you carte blanche, do whatever is convenient, get used to the idea that this the only way things can be done.

So a multitude of communities rebelling and complaints about environmental damage fell on deaf ears but a technical spec might be paid attention to.

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

#170

Post by maxnevermind »

RachelF wrote: post #97
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.

> everything is now attached to a watercooled block

Does it increases manufacturing and operational cost of such racks?

Post reply on HN