
Green revolution cooling - xearl
http://www.grcooling.com/
======
jacques_chester
In the old days Cray had a fluid-cooled supercomputer. It was immersed in a
witches brew called Fluorinert, which if I understand correctly was banned
under various CFC-related treaties (edit: no mention of such banning on
Wikipedia, I may be thinking of other cooling liquids).

My Dad is a radio man and has been around high-powered electronics for most of
his career. He explained the pros and cons of liquid cooling this way:

Pros.

1\. Theoretically very efficient.

2\. Amazing equipment densities.

Cons.

1\. Congratulations! You are now a plumber.

Even purified water is murderously destructive. He told me stories about
replacing piping in a water cooled electronics room. Every few months they
would have to shut down, drain the system and replace a pipe corner. The
vortices of water going around a 90 degree bend caused enough cavitation to
gouge out visible shapes on the inside of the pipes. After a few months the
copper pipes would crack and leak on the electronics.

Immersion in inert liquids is fine so far as it goes, but you're still going
to be a plumber.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_Even purified water is murderously destructive._

Indeed, water is _more_ destructive to materials than many other liquids. And
deionized water is the worst. It turns out that you have to explicitly _make_
deionized water for a reason: Many of the things that touch water want to
dissolve in it! And the fewer ions of, say, copper that are already in your
water, the faster a rod of copper dissolves when you dip it into that water.

Think of water the way you think about the blood of the aliens in _Aliens_ –
only on a slightly slower timescale – and you'll realize why boat maintenance
is better thought of as a lifestyle rather than as a series of repairs.

~~~
jacques_chester
I didn't realise that about deionised water. At least it's not toxic when
gaseous (unlike fluorinert) or flammable (like mineral oil).

As for boating ... I vaguely recall the joke that it's easier and more fun
just to pour cash into the sea than to get a boat.

------
DanBC
I've seen lots of these with single machines dunked in a fishtank.

This is the first I've seen with many machines submerged.

I'd be interested to see the results of long term testing.

I'm guessing that big data centres avoid this because it's just so messy; at
what point do cost savings from cooling over-ride inconvenience of dripping
oil everywhere.

A final nitpick: the website is a bit frustrating, and could do with some
better design, and much better photographs.

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TobbenTM
So if something breaks on a server, like a PSU unit, or a HDD, would you need
to shut down the entire server, drain the liquid (or raise the server), and
then swap out affected parts? Would that not be very unpractical?

~~~
xearl
they have a video demonstrating how to do server maintenance:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZmm7P1mPZs>

no need to shut down the server. you pull it out and swap the parts (for
front-accessible hotswap HDDs you won't even have to pull it out). cabling is
designed to accommodate that.

i can imagine, though, that "pulling out" a 4U storage box fully loaded with
hdds may become a bit strenuous.

~~~
nknight
Just pulling a 2U system with 2 HDDs out of an ordinary rack is strenuous if
you're not it decent shape, yanking a loaded 4U box out in the manner that
video shows is a quick path to pain.

I think they need to build a simple pulley or hydraulic lift system for these.

------
jisaacstone
The first thing I saw when I looked at the page was:

"95% Less Cooling Power"

It took me a while to figure out that it _uses_ 95% less power, not that is is
95% less effective.

THis could be a bit more clear.

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kevinpet
"reducing cooling energy use by 90-95%" seems unlikely, unless you are in a
cool climate and you can use outside air to cool. That is, put the radiator on
the north face of your data center.

This is exactly where more conventional and less sticky methods can achieve
good results, so I'm skeptical of the value.

~~~
onemoreact
Water has much better thermal conductivity than air so significantly warmer
water can provide equivalent levels of cooling. Also, most computer components
are designed to be air cooled in an office setting so they can get fairly warm
with little damage. In other words to keep an 80w CPU at 45 to 50c might take
water at 35c but air at 20c. If the outside air is 40c then then you only need
to actively drop the water 5deg where air needs to drop 20deg and cooling
systems are much more efficient for small changes in temperature than large
ones. You can probably find many cases where air temperature water is
perfectly acceptable where you would want chilled air to do the same thing.

PS: 40c = 104f and most cpu's are fine at 50c most are still ok at 60+c. If
the outside temperature is more reasonable you can often get away with
passively cooling water systems where air needs to be actively cooled. You can
also combine this with other methods aka if a local lake can give you water
below 30c most of the year you might be able to use a passive cooling system
with water even if you would need to actively cool air.

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Samuel_Michon
Listeners of the 5by5.tv podcasts will have heard of this concept before.
That's where Midas Green Tech advertises their "virtual private servers
submerged in oil".

Green Revolution Cooling supplied Midas Green Tech with their setup.

~~~
sjs
Most folks who have lurked on sites like Slashdot, Reddit, and Hacker News
will have seen this before. It's a pretty old trick now. (Old in Internet
time)

<http://www.google.ca/search?q=computer+oil>

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signa11
just curious: would these machines have non-rotational media only ?

~~~
devy
SSDs in server farms are the way to go anyway.

~~~
DEinspanjer
Wow.. really? Is this a trend with any documentation? Seems to me that there
are still a lot of mentions of SSD failures floating around the tubes, and
that plus the significant cost for large scale storage over traditional
platters would make it a very tough sell to any organization wanting to deploy
large quantities of servers.

~~~
boredguy8
Mechanical disk supply chains are increasing platter drive costs significantly
while at the same time improvements in reliability and cost for SSDs are
bringing costs lower. And yes, there have been large deployments:
[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218811/EBay_attacks_...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218811/EBay_attacks_server_virtualization_with_100TB_of_SSD_storage)

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seltzered_
Yes, this startup has been working on this idea since 2008/2009. My main fear
would be much of a cost benefit this is versus the outcome of a company
switching to ARM over the coming years.

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nsomaru
It seems the servers for this site need some metaphorical mineral oil. The
database is not responsive anymore :/

~~~
zuppy
google cache for the gallery:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-
ab&...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-
ab&hl=ro&safe=off&biw=1280&bih=674&source=hp&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.grcooling.com%2Fgallery%2F&pbx=1&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.grcooling.com%2Fgallery%2F&aq=f&aqi=g4&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=912l2548l0l2600l7l3l0l0l0l0l128l370l0.3l3l0)

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dhyasama
I read the headline as "The green revolution is slowing down".

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nobody3141592
Wonder what the long term effect is on something like polyester caps and
delaminating multilayer boards

Fire suppression is going to be fun.

