rack power question

michael.dillon at bt.com michael.dillon at bt.com
Tue Mar 25 16:04:58 UTC 2008


>  Or perhaps some non-conductive working fluid instead of water.   
>  That might not carry quite as much heat as water, but it would surely

>  carry more than air and if chosen correctly would have more benign
results  
>  when the inevitable leaks and spills occur.  
 
HCFC-123 is likely what would be used, which means that you would want
to limit the amount of time that you spend inside the data center
because, with the large number of connections in the facility, leaks
will be inevitable and inhaling the gas causes liver damage.
 
Essentially, you are saying that we should get rid of chillers and turn
the entire data center into a giant chiller. Instead of being a building
with rooms and equipment, the data center becomes a machine and humans
only venture inside when the machine is shut down for maintenance. 
 
>  Less practical but more fun to contemplate would be data centers
pressurized  
>  with a working gas that offers better heat transfer than
oxygen/nitrogen and no  
>  oxidation potential.  Airlocks and suits for the techs, but no fire
worries ever.   
>  Heck, just close the room and inject liquid nitrogen under the raised
floor to be  
>  scavenged overhead and re-compressed, chilled, liquefied and sent
round again.  
>  Reserve cooling for power outages is just huge dewars full of liquid
nitrogen :)

 >  Not so serious today,
 
Why not? If you take your pressurized liquid nitrogen scenario and turn
it inside out, then it might well be workable and there would be no need
for suits. For instance, imagine a cylinder containing the liquid nitro
cooling (liquid air might be cheaper) with devices attached all around
like the petals on a flower. Each device has heat exchangers for cooling
the hottest parts (CPUs) and the heat exchangers are attached to the
cooling cylinder. With continued increase in density of cores, this
could be feasible. In essence it would be a kind of blade server with
the cooling and backplane in a central cylinder. Added benefits might
come from supercooling the backplane.
 
Consider what is happening beyond the consumer dual and 8-core (PS3)
machines. 
<http://www.tilera.com/products/boards.php>
<http://www.sicortex.com/architecture_tour>
 
--Michael Dillon
 
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