Air conditioning may one day be an old memory in data centers. Intel is exploring new avenues to cool its servers. He announces that he has signed an agreement with Green Revolution Cooling (GRC), a specialist in liquid cooling by immersion. This is its second partnership of this type after a first collaboration initiated with another company called Submer, end of August.
Intel and GRC will offer solutions to joint customers for racks powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors. The two actors will test the security and reliability of the technologies and optimize the performance of the system. They also plan to evangelize the market with webinars and podcasts.
A liquid that absorbs heat
It is not a question, as Microsoft does experimentally, of going to immerse servers in the open sea. It is on solid ground that this is happening. In this case, Green Revolution Cooling immerses servers in a rack filled with a cooling liquid of which it has the secret, guaranteed non-toxic and non-conductive. It absorbs the heat of the servers in operation. The cooling capacity would go up to 200 kW per rack. Enough to support 42 machines with high performance processors.
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Data center cooling systems are becoming critical with global warming. On the one hand, data centers must increase their capacities to meet the growing demand from businesses and the general public. On the other hand, some equipment heats up more to produce ever more calculations, in particular with the development of artificial intelligence.
It is therefore necessary both to reduce the environmental footprint and the cost of cooling systems. Other solutions exist than immersion. The DC5 data center of Scaleway, a subsidiary of the Iliad group in France, has thus developed an adiabatic process that also allows it to do without air conditioning.
Source: Green Revolution Cooling, Tom’s Hardware