4 ms·

The problem with liquid cooling, ultimately, is you're still dumping to air. You're actually doing not much more with liquid cooling than just changing where th

The problem with liquid cooling, ultimately, is you're still dumping to air. You're actually doing not much more with liquid cooling than just changing where the heat concentration is located. Unless your radiator is outside of the building itself, you're dumping that waste heat right back into the system over time.

c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago
>The problem with liquid cooling, ultimately, is you're still dumping to air. There's a lot of things you can do outside of a server chassis that you cannot do inside of a chassis. You can have heat exchangers with far more surface area than what you are volume constrained to inside of a chassis. You can run evaporative cooling towers. If you're in the right climate, you can even radiate that heat to space. >You're actually doing not much more with liquid cooling than just changing where the heat concentration is located. You're using a more efficient heat transfer medium which does a lot of things for you. You can downsize your chiller tonnage, reduce/eliminate CRAC/CRAH units, and all the UPS required to keep those systems running. All of this translates to CAPEX and OPEX savings. >Unless your radiator is outside of the building itself, you're dumping that waste heat right back into the system over time. No one is suggesting that you can plonk some servers into a tank of liquid and the thermal energy magically disappears. Of course, there has to be a thermodynamic "sink" that you are dumping to... the atmosphere, the ocean, the ground, space, etc. Liquid cooling is more efficient means of transferring heat from source to sink.
zmgsabst 4y ago
Isn’t that the point? You use a liquid to transport the heat from denser compute (lowering costs), then run it through a high efficiency radiator (eg, drip/spray towers like with industrial AC). Your compute is denser and your interface with the air is more efficient.
- abakker 4y ago
  Yes. Liquid cooling is surface area arbitrage. You turn small surface area into large area with a good conductor between them

c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago

>The problem with liquid cooling, ultimately, is you're still dumping to air. There's a lot of things you can do outside of a server chassis that you cannot do inside of a chassis. You can have heat exchangers with far more surface area than what you are volume constrained to inside of a chassis. You can run evaporative cooling towers. If you're in the right climate, you can even radiate that heat to space. >You're actually doing not much more with liquid cooling than just changing where the heat concentration is located. You're using a more efficient heat transfer medium which does a lot of things for you. You can downsize your chiller tonnage, reduce/eliminate CRAC/CRAH units, and all the UPS required to keep those systems running. All of this translates to CAPEX and OPEX savings. >Unless your radiator is outside of the building itself, you're dumping that waste heat right back into the system over time. No one is suggesting that you can plonk some servers into a tank of liquid and the thermal energy magically disappears. Of course, there has to be a thermodynamic "sink" that you are dumping to... the atmosphere, the ocean, the ground, space, etc. Liquid cooling is more efficient means of transferring heat from source to sink.

zmgsabst 4y ago

Isn’t that the point? You use a liquid to transport the heat from denser compute (lowering costs), then run it through a high efficiency radiator (eg, drip/spray towers like with industrial AC). Your compute is denser and your interface with the air is more efficient.

abakker 4y ago
Yes. Liquid cooling is surface area arbitrage. You turn small surface area into large area with a good conductor between them