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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

#151

Post by ryan_lane »

SamPatt wrote: post #139
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

>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...

This study doesn't factor in droughts, floods, crop death (and starvation), and other non-direct effects. It also doesn't consider wet-bulb events, because it's looking at average ambient temperatures.

I don't think this is climate change propaganda, but your application of this study by evoking it in a discussion about climate change feels like it.

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

#152

Post by Marsymars »

xattt wrote: post #24
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

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.

> No one bats an eye when an air conditioner runs.

I find their noise pretty obnoxious. Out of respect for my neighbours, when I get around to installing one, I'll be getting the absolute quietest model available.

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

#153

Post by SoftTalker »

lstodd wrote: post #145
CamperBob2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you like to work in the middle of nowhere?

After construction, not all that many people work at a data center. Some ops staff, maybe a small security team.

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

#154

Post by pwg »

dialogbox wrote: post #114

>Previous liquid-cooled servers were hybrid: GPUs and CPUs got cold plates, but the rest of the system stayed air-cooled, with finned heat sinks designed to shed heat into moving air. In a fully liquid-cooled server, the cooling for these components needed to be completely redesigned to use liquid. Does that mean the whole server board is running in liquid? If true, how do they do maintenance? Replacing parts must be…

The article implied (but did not seem to ever state) that they simply added liquid cooled cold plates to all the other components that were previously air cooled.

But it did not sound like they were describing a Cray 2 style liquid immersion cooling system.

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

#155

Post by dietr1ch »

frollogaston wrote: post #131
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.

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

Haven't AMD CPUs been targeting a 95°C limit for 5+ years already? I'd have guessed servers could do 60°C without degrading a whole lot before switching to more power efficient hardware is available.

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

#156

Post by frollogaston »

dietr1ch wrote: post #155
frollogaston wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Haven't AMD CPUs been targeting a 95°C limit for 5+ years already? I'd have guessed servers could do 60°C without degrading a whole lot before switching to more power efficient hardware is available.

95˚C is the core temp, not ambient. My parent comment was probably wrong though, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667527

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

#157

Post by annzabelle »

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

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 while having excellent schools. Data centers are unsightly and use electricity and water, but so does literally any kind of industrial facility. They are also pretty quiet, if you exclude the ones using on site gas turbines for electricity.

Property values have consistently gone up in that region for decades, and are up to $6 million an acre if there's enough contiguous land to put another data center on.

Many of the people complaining about datacenters would also complain about literally any kind of development.

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

#158

Post by matt-p »

superluserdo wrote: post #107
matt-p wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In essence you can't really because slower flow rate makes the heat transfer less efficient. You'd be halfing the flow rate in that example.

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

#159

Post by matt-p »

frollogaston wrote: post #132
matt-p wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Definitely!

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

#160

Post by arjie »

toast0 wrote: post #122
arjie wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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".
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