Immersion Datacenter Cooling: Enhanced Equipment Performance + Space Optimization
Immersion cooling offers a powerful solution for hosting high-value services such as AI and HPC workloads more cost-effectively in your datacenter. This approach leverages the superior cooling capabilities of immersion systems, guaranteeing optimal temperatures for such demanding workloads. Consequently, your equipment performs at its best, ensuring reliable operations.
Essentially, this strategy creates the perfect environment for resource-heavy tasks, enabling you to offer premium services and seize bigger market opportunities. It's an effective method to fuel your business potential.
In my previous article, I mentioned how this works -> Immersion Datacenter Cooling: Unparalleled Cooling Efficiency — Hume Consulting
Due to increased thermal operating temperatures, chips can function at higher temperatures for extended periods. This reduces throttling, and therefore, maintains system performance.
The utilization of a chip (GPU or CPU) directly corresponds with power needs to support higher frequencies. When a chip operates near its peak frequencies, it requires maximum power, thereby producing the most heat. Immersion cooling can efficiently manage this heat, preventing the chip from throttling, and thus maintaining optimal performance.
Optimizing Space with Immersion Cooling
One of the challenges often faced by data centers is restricted floor space. But immersion cooling helps tackle this issue by eliminating the necessity for bulky air conditioning units and intricate air circulation systems. The result is increased usable space in your datacenter, enabling you to repurpose it for revenue-generating activities.
Whether you decide to house more servers or dedicate areas for AI and HPC workloads, immersion cooling provides you with the flexibility to maximize space utilization and profitability.
Hotspotting (from https://dcimnews.wordpress.com/)
Greenfield would be best, right?
Designing a greenfield datacenter based on immersion cooling can offer significant benefits, including a significant reduction in physical footprint and operational costs.
But in the short term...
It's all about the Brownfield
In the near term, retrofitting existing data centers to leverage immersion cooling will see a surge in activity. Data centers with unused capacity, either in terms of floor space or power, can augment their capacity through the flexible deployment of tanks and minimal impact on existing cooling capacity. Some will actively decommission aging infrastructure, hardware and systems to facilitate upgrades, and better utilize their capacity.
Sell more, cheaper to operate AND lowers overall PUE and carbon emissions? What a deal!
A GRC solution was used in Texas (Lonestar6), hanging out with it's air-cooled forefathers.
And Edge!
The edge brings even more opportunities. Thanks to the modular and portable nature of immersion cooling solutions, we can see deployments in high-density residential areas, shopping centers, university campuses for HPC research, and challenging locations for telco providers.
For instance, in residential settings, the absence of fans ensures a silent operation that goes unnoticed by locals, who can enjoy cheap or even free access to central heating.
Moreover, immersion cooling is expanding into the military and governmental sector, with ruggedized versions being developed for multi-100kW to several MW deployments that provide real-time analytics at the edge.
While traditional cooling methods force certain layout restrictions, immersion cooling offers more design freedom, form factors, and installation of compute in locations and geo's that have been economically, and or technically unfeasible using air.
DataQube's podular solution(s)
What a time to be alive :)