45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

nialse

Heat exchange is used instead of refrigerating the coolant. Makes sense. How do they manage the indoor climate for the humans working there though? Eventually everything will be at 45C in the building, will it not?

eqvinox

On one hand: great! On the other hand: the heat has to go somewhere . So… where? Datacenters already create a warm microclimate in their vicinity, is that getting even worse?

qsxfthnkp2322

Claude write good. Nvidia has so much money and they can’t afford to pay a human for a day of their time to write a blog post?

amluto

This opens up an interesting synergy: district heating. 45C is low but not unworkable for a district heating loop, and a data center might be able to make a nice pitch to a community if the data center offers to provide heat to a district heating system for free. This brings the value to the local community of a nearby datacenter up from near zero to potentially a few million dollars per year. Summer is still an issue, but fun solutions are possible. With the right geology, I think it’s possible to heat an underground volume in the summer and recapture (some of) that heat in the winter. In many, many climates, annual heating costs are far higher than cooling costs, at least if people aren’t stupid with skylights. [0] [0] As a back-of-the-envelope heuristic, heating or cooling load due to conduction and air exchange is proportional to the difference between indoor and outdoor temperature. Outdoor temperatures of -10F to 30F are not unusual in the winter and are 40-80F away from an indoor temp of 70F. But outdoor temperatures in these climates rarely exceed 95F and are mostly lower in the summer, so that’s 15-25F of cooling. And heat pumps are more efficient at smaller temperature differences. Radiative heating is an entirely different story.

htrp

wasn't this announced at gtc in march?

mchusma

This is also the type of thing that makes space based data centers more viable. I was previously more skeptical on the concept but have come around. I do think ground based centers will have better economics when they can be built though, and this addresses noise and water complaints which are the big 2 regional complaints. It seems like lots of bottlenecks are getting solved quickly, except for maybe memory.

t0mpr1c3

with efficient heat exchange you could get the coolant up to mash temperature (65C) and run a combined data center/brewery

m3kw9

This is what PC heat sinks uses. Someone could have thought of that

kayo_20211030

> In favorable climates, NVIDIA’s 45-degree liquid-cooling architecture .... What's a favorable climate, apart from, obviously, Greenland? The piece is a little light on details on the correlation between outside temperatures and efficiency & cost. It'd be nice to see even a broad-strokes discussion of that.

uberex

Weird I was daydreaming about why isn't this done the other day (in the context of desert datacentres running on solar anf battery). Glad to see it is a thing.

metabagel

The NASA Ames Research Center Modular Supercomputing Facility is highly efficient, both in terms of electricity and water use. The facility isn't air conditioned. The chips are water cooled, and the inlet water temperature is pretty high I believe - I think it's 90 degrees Fahrenheit. https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/ames/doing-more-... https://www.nas.nasa.gov/assets/nas/pdf/ModularSupercomputin...

VorpalWay

I never looked into this, but why would a datacenter consume water for cooling in the first place? Sure, they use some. But just like you fill up the cooling loop in a car, once it is there it just circulates between the heat source and radiators and/or heat exchangers, with perhaps some minimal top off needed (since flexible tubing isn't 100% water proof). Or are they for some unfathomable reason using evaporative cooling in data centers?

why_at

Maybe I'm being dumb, but I don't understand what the innovation is here. I get that they're using liquid coolant at higher than usual temperatures, but why couldn't they do that before? Most of the comparison in the article is for air cooled datacenters but what about other liquid cooled ones? Surely in all the previous datacenters that have been designed there has been someone doing the math and determining what temperature things need to run at, how much energy it will use, how much heat it all will produce, etc. edit: just saw this: >Previous liquid-cooled servers were hybrid: GPUs and CPUs got cold plates, but the rest of the system stayed air-cooled, with finned heat sinks designed to shed heat into moving air. In a fully liquid-cooled server, the cooling for these components needed to be completely redesigned to use liquid.

sabareesh

I am pretty much doing the same but running the coolant at 40 deg C instead of 45 as my pumps are rated for 45 C max temp. Here is bit more about my setup https://sabareesh.com/posts/blackwell-waterblock/

emsign

Greenwashing, that's all. This is not going to be the standard it's just a light house project to calm some nerves to keep on going.

dialogbox

>Previous liquid-cooled servers were hybrid: GPUs and CPUs got cold plates, but the rest of the system stayed air-cooled, with finned heat sinks designed to shed heat into moving air. In a fully liquid-cooled server, the cooling for these components needed to be completely redesigned to use liquid. Does that mean the whole server board is running in liquid? If true, how do they do maintenance? Replacing parts must be extremely difficult.

prng2021

“That unlocks something beyond energy savings: the possibility of eliminating water consumption entirely.” They’ve made this claim numerous times in the article and I really don’t understand it. The building has tons of water being recirculated through it. That water came from somewhere in the surrounding natural world. How is that 0 water consumption?

fwipsy

My understanding is that datacenter water consumption is not really that big of a deal compared to other industries, and it's mostly inflated by people who are looking for a reason to criticize AI/datacenters. If Nvidia is hoping to placate those people, I predict it will not work.

sourcegrift

I'm worried about the carbon footprint and other impacts of the higher temperature

mips_avatar

My GPUs at home produce 60°C water. I just wish I had a good use for them.