111–120 of 450 posts
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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
Noise is a design choice and could likely be legislated away. Reject heat is different than heating from greenhouse gas effects that are “heating the planet”. No one bats an eye when an air conditioner runs.
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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.
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…
1gw of power converts approx 400 liters of cold water into steam _per second_.
Does that mean the whole server board is running in liquid? If true, how do they do maintenance? Replacing parts must be extremely difficult.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The climate requirements to run at this hotter temperature still probably means it'll require more active cooling in the desert during daytime /summers. Assuming we're talking about hotter desert environments like US southwest. That might make your proposal not as economical. Imo we should just solve the problems with data centers being near cities. Manage/regulate the noise and any waste (heat included, it shouldn't…
You might (but probably not) be able to do district heating with this, but electricity generation is not going to be efficient. Heat is a very low grade form of energy, and you need a large differential to drive a turbine efficiently. If you cycle between 45 C and 55 C water temperature (as mentioned by the press release), you are only getting a 10 C delta. That isn't even enough for district heating, probably not ev…
You are calculating the wrong delta T. To heat a space, you need your working fluid to be warmer that the space you’re heating by an appropriate amount.
55°C is certainly on the cool side to heat a building, but it’s entirely workable with a high-area, highish-thermal-conductivity system. Here’s an actual chart:
https://www.warmboard.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/WaterTe...
You don’t actually want an absurdly warm floor.
Even for buildings that need warmer fluid, water at 45-55°C is a fantastic source for a heat pump.
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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
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.
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…
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.