On 5/22/19 12:49 AM, Christian Corti via cctalk wrote:
On Tue, 21 May 2019, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
Plumbing (unless you're doing aisle
containment or RDHx) shouldn't run
through the IT space in the data center.
So how exactly do you attach a modern water cooled rack system to your
cooling water system if not using plumbing?
So how are data centers cooled with water now? Does the water cool
coldplates directly?
I've had only a couple of instances where cooling water was used. In
the case of CDC mainframes, it was used to cool the condenser coils in
the refrigeration units (located in the mainframe). I believe that Cray
initially used the same guy that CDC used to fabricate the cooling tubing.
I recall visiting the Honeywell plant in Phoenix not long after they
took it over from GE and the engineers there were tinkering with a
direct water-cooling setup--water circulated in each rack (connected by
what was probably vinyl tubing, I don't recall, only that it was
translucent), with copper diaphragms serving as the interface between
the water and the semiconductors. I recall from comments made that
algae was a problem and adding an algicide to the cooling water tended
to corrode the copper diaphragms.
To the best of my knowledge, this was a test setup--it certainly had an
impressive instrumentation unit with multiple CRTs and neon
thermometer-type displays.
The most extreme example I ever ran into of cooling was the ETA-10
supercomputer--cooled with liquid nitrogen, supplied by a cryostat. I
don't recall what cooled the latter.
--Chuck