Microsoft has announced its advances in liquid cooling for Data Centers, and it is that with increasingly faster CPUs and GPGPUs, and with higher consumption, the cost of cooling has become a serious problem, since for companies like Microsoft itself, Google, Facebook or Amazon, a traditional air cooling system is not viable.
According to the company, cryptocurrency miners have been the pioneers in this and have noticed them, and it involves submerging the very components that make up the mining farms of a cooling liquid. This not only reduces temperatures, but energy consumption is reduced by 5 to 15 percent.
The refrigerant in question that Microsoft is using in its first Data Center with this design is developed by 3M. Although it looks like water, its boiling point is only 50ºC, half that of water. Obviously, it is not a driver, and it also shows that mining has quickly learned its lesson, which is also to always seek high energy efficiency.
Microsoft's cooling system consists of large vats in which the servers are submerged in this harmless liquid for electronic components and it boils at just 50ºC. The heat from the servers is transferred to the fluid, which boils and carries the heat without the risk of overheating. Each of the tanks contains a condenser that comes into contact with the gas, cooling it to a liquid and reintroducing it into the circuit. Microsoft claims that this new cooling method will improve efficiency and sustainability by making better use of resources.
"Participants in the cryptocurrency sector pioneered liquid immersion cooling for computer equipment, using it to cool the chips that record digital currency transactions.
Microsoft investigated liquid immersion as a cooling solution for high-performance computing applications, such as AI. Among other things, the research revealed that biphasic immersion cooling reduced the power consumption of any server by between 5% and 15%."
0 Comments