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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

#241

Post by one33seven »

sysguest wrote: post #186
bbor wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat is not a cost -- no one is physically cooking because they live within miles of a building with computers in it. Water usage is not a cost with this new technology -- that is what the article is about. Infrasound is terrifically understudied and should not be discussed definitively based on the findings of a highly-biased amateur, but regardless: fan sound is not a cost with this new technology -- that is what t…

> Heat is not a cost hmm? maybe it differs from time to time? on summer, it IS cost (nearby need to run AC)

also ecological and medical problems

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

#242

Post by amoshebb »

Why only 45? And why water cooling?

It strikes me that building everything around room temperature or slightly chilled air is a strange choice. This is already 290K-300K or so, and now this is suggesting that things run fine at 320K or 330K?

I've wondered why we couldn't just design everything to operate around 200°C and just use free-cooling by pumping ambient air through. Why don't data centres look more like chicken barns? Do things melt? Are there more errors of some other type at high temperatures?

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

#243

Post by joxdosba »

amoshebb wrote: post #242

Why only 45? And why water cooling? It strikes me that building everything around room temperature or slightly chilled air is a strange choice. This is already 290K-300K or so, and now this is suggesting that things run fine at 320K or 330K? I've wondered why we couldn't just design everything to operate around 200°C and just use free-cooling by pumping ambient air through. Why don't data centres look more like chick…

It’d be very hard to make these chips work at 200C, the electrical properties of semiconductors vary significantly with temperature.

It would require entirely different chips with entirely different manufacturing processes.

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

#244

Post by joxdosba »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #228

> In the right geography — somewhere with reliably cool outdoor air Aaahh, there’s the catch. “Save resources on cooling by building your data centre somewhere cold, and pollute the surrounding environment by dumping your waste heat wholesale into that!” Good job Nvidia, I almost thought we had something good there.

Have you stopped for a second to consider the utter mathematical absurdity of what you’re suggesting here?

It is impossible for a datacenter to meaningfully heat more than the air in its immediate vicinity.

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

#245

Post by matt-p »

dist-epoch wrote: post #221
matt-p wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you can use a heat exchanger, like in nuclear power plants, and separate the data center flow from the outside flow, so they can go at different speeds.

You would use a heat exchanger normally anyway. Forcing the outside (DH) to be slow would get you that, but there is cost in having low flow in that HXs are less efficient at the far end and you can transfer less heat in the same pipework (it would more than half the district heating capacity). So in practice, not really.

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

#246

Post by inglor_cz »

mukbangpervert wrote: post #190
audunw wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe those complaints are for datacenters using gas turbines for power. I think some of the recent ones (xAIs?) was built without sufficient power from the grid.

xAI colossus was built without sufficient grid power, so uses "mobile" gas turbines to generate power. It's absurd, and serves as evidence that we need a confiscatory wealth tax, if we want to maintain a society.

For me, it is evidence that our ability to build new power stations has seriously eroded, mostly due to bureaucracy, and that we need to fix this if we want to maintain competitiveness.

Consider the following graph which shows the power generation capabilities of China vs. the US during the last 40 years.

https://www.notboring.co/p/the-electric-slide?utm_source=sub...

The fact that data centers need to resort to gas turbines is downstream from this bureaucratic, NIMBY-driven impotency.

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

#247

Post by adastra22 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #195
badpun wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European cities are doing it already.

Blew my mind living in a Berlin apartment, that the heating & hot water was managed centrally for the entire block (not the apartment block, the whole city block). Too used to Anglo cities where everyone does for themselves.

New York has central steam heating.

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

#248

Post by moffkalast »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #228

> In the right geography — somewhere with reliably cool outdoor air Aaahh, there’s the catch. “Save resources on cooling by building your data centre somewhere cold, and pollute the surrounding environment by dumping your waste heat wholesale into that!” Good job Nvidia, I almost thought we had something good there.

On an unrelated note, there are so many em dashes in this article I have to wonder if there was any human involved in the process at all. They could've at least signed Nemotron underneath as to not to offend reality.

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

#249

Post by helsinkiandrew »

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…

In Finland the datacentre heat is boosted to 60–90°C for district heating (new builds tend to use heat pumps) [1]

A 75-MW data center in Mäntsälä has provided 2/3 of the heat for the town (2,500 homes) for a decade [2]

1. https://www.creatingsustainablecities.org.uk/post/case-study...

2. https://www.sustainabilitymenews.com/waste-management/how-fi...

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

#250

Post by NewsaHackO »

joxdosba wrote: post #244
FridgeSeal wrote: post #228

> In the right geography — somewhere with reliably cool outdoor air Aaahh, there’s the catch. “Save resources on cooling by building your data centre somewhere cold, and pollute the surrounding environment by dumping your waste heat wholesale into that!” Good job Nvidia, I almost thought we had something good there.

Have you stopped for a second to consider the utter mathematical absurdity of what you’re suggesting here? It is impossible for a datacenter to meaningfully heat more than the air in its immediate vicinity.

It’s anti AI, so people would actually believe the data centers are going to singlehandly melt the icecaps
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