ASHRAE Journal - July 2019 - 20

TECHNICAL FEATURE

Moderating the Impact of
Integrating Water-Cooled
Servers Into Data Centers
BY ROGER SCHMIDT, PH.D., MEMBER ASHRAE; MARK STEINKE, PH.D., MEMBER ASHRAE; AUSTIN SHELNUTT, MEMBER ASHRAE

The primary cooling method for IT equipment housed inside the world's data centers
involves use of air cooling. This trend may be shifting to liquid cooling as customers of
IT equipment are increasingly being driven by scientiﬁc computing to support artiﬁcial intelligence (AI) and high performance computing (HPC). With each new generation of IT equipment, manufacturers are being pushed to increase their processing
capability (resulting in more heat being generated) and explore more effective means
of cooling. The heat generated is starting to bump up against the limits of conventional air-cooling approaches.
Air cooling has worked well for systems that deploy
processors up to 150 W, but IT equipment is now being
manufactured with processors well above 150 W where
air cooling is no longer practical. The power for one
company's graphics processor unit (GPU) is currently at
300 W. Another company produces a CPU announced
at 205 W and a many integrated cores (MIC) GPU
announced at 320 W.
Not only are processors pushing designs to use water
cooling, other components, such as memory and voltage regulators, supporting these processors are also
pushing into the realm of liquid cooling. The 2018
Supercomputing (SC18) show in Dallas clearly showed
the adoption of liquid cooling is on the upswing, with
displays from most of the major IT manufacturers displaying their liquid-cooling products, but also a number

of vendors showing server-oriented liquid-cooling
technologies.
Liquid cooling is far more efﬁcient than air cooling in
terms of heat transfer. It is also more energy efﬁcient,
reducing electrical energy costs signiﬁcantly. Being
more energy efﬁcient reduces the carbon footprint and
contributes to the goals of being "green" in the operation of the data center. Liquid cooling can eliminate
the need for additional racks, creating higher data
center server densities using less space. Also, liquid
cooling can allow higher processing speeds-CPUs and
other components can run cooler using liquid cooling.
Designing with liquid cooling can reduce or eliminate
the need for air-moving devices, thereby decreasing the
noise levels in the data center (which in many cases are
approaching OSHA limits). And ﬁnally, liquid cooling

Roger Schmidt, Ph.D., is an IBM Fellow at IBM. Mark Steinke, Ph.D., is thermal engineering manager and thermal architect at Cray. Austin Shelnutt is director of technology at
Jabil.
20

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ASHRAE Journal - July 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ASHRAE Journal - July 2019

Contents
ASHRAE Journal - July 2019 - Intro
ASHRAE Journal - July 2019 - Cover1
ASHRAE Journal - July 2019 - Cover2
ASHRAE Journal - July 2019 - 1
ASHRAE Journal - July 2019 - Contents
ASHRAE Journal - July 2019 - 3
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ASHRAE Journal - July 2019 - Cover3
ASHRAE Journal - July 2019 - Cover4
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