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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

#131

Post by frollogaston »

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.

The innovation is being able to run the chips at higher temps without ruining them too quickly.

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

#132

Post by frollogaston »

matt-p wrote: post #56
kayo_20211030 wrote: post #50

> 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.

Yeah, this is part of the issue to be honest. You'd need outdoor air to be below ~37°C to guarantee 45°C water outlet temperature. In most locations you still need cooling towers or compressors some of the time, so you still have to build all the infrastructure that comes with them; though reducing their use is still great, saving serious amounts of water or energy. For e.g you might think of the outskirts of London…

So they only have to actively cool when it's above 98˚F outside, that's still way better than what they do now

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

#133

Post by frollogaston »

mchusma wrote: post #22

This is also the type of thing that makes space based data centers more viable. I was previously more skeptical on the concept but have come around. I do think ground based centers will have better economics when they can be built though, and this addresses noise and water complaints which are the big 2 regional complaints. It seems like lots of bottlenecks are getting solved quickly, except for maybe memory.

This relies on transferring heat to the outdoor air. Can't do that in space.

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

#134

Post by briandw »

emsign wrote: post #101

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.

It's a response to the FUD that is water usage in data centers. Data centers don't use a meaningful amount of water when compared to just about any other industrial application, or many recreational ones. Data centers used about 66 billion liters 2023. source: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1 Golf courses used 2 trillion liters in 2020. We won't even bring up almond production.

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

#135

Post by frollogaston »

signatoremo wrote: post #65
dgellow wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that change the calculus for space datacenters? There is still no reasons or benefits to having them in space. You still have to rely solely on radiative cooling. That doesn’t solve any of the maintenance problems. Space datacenters is a really dumb and unrealistic idea Musk is talking about to hype his companies, it’s not meant to actually be done. Anything in space is more expensive and way harder to do, f…

What do you think of China, also dumb, or just blindly FOMO? https://spacenews.com/china-backs-orbital-data-center-startu... https://www.reuters.com/science/china-vows-develop-space-tou... Plans for space data centers should be seen with skepticism. However when they are backed by different parties who have stakes in the game, that's more credible. More than HN crowd for sure.

I would comfortably bet at least $1000 that this is bs, and it would be more money than China has put in so far. They've got a "vow."

To answer your first question, yes. Even if they were US companies. Remember when each Big Tech player was claiming to build their own blockchain, except centralized which was a contradiction.

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

#136

Post by frollogaston »

asdff wrote: post #41
dgellow wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A datacenter is about data. Your network of space router is in no way something a reasonable person would consider a datacenter... Even less an inference datacenter.

Why, because on board storage is too small and the compute nodes are underpowered? And that can't ever change? A reasonable person doesn't understand technology usually. That is increasingly an understanding left to the wizard class. I mean people make clusters out of raspberry pis and minipcs.

This only makes sense if the compute nodes only become more powerful in space in the future and not also on the ground.

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

#137

Post by NekkoDroid »

taneq wrote: post #125
AlotOfReading wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AMD CPUs basically all boost up to 90°C as a relatively normal operating temperature as long as the power (and some other factors) allow it to. I assume AMDs and NVs GPUs do to, but I play mostly CPU bound games so I see mine just sitting at ~60°C under load.

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

#138

Post by frollogaston »

taneq wrote: post #125
AlotOfReading wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Core temp though. Ambient temp is a different story, and also depends on air vs water. In fact the article suggests the difference is getting the water more directly onto the chips, no mention of running at a higher core temp.

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

#139

Post by SamPatt »

ramon156 wrote: post #18
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…

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

>the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating

Nearly 10x more people die from the cold than from the heat.

"...9.43% of global deaths were attributable to non-optimal temperatures, with 8.52% from cold and 0.91% from heat."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

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

#140

Post by XorNot »

frollogaston wrote: post #129
gleenn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just because it's not new doesn't mean that it was available or that the engineering needed to bring it to mass market wasn't significant.
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