Researchers
in the UK believe the energy needed to cool global data centers run by giants
like Facebook and Google could be cut by more than 90 percent by replacing air
cooling with non-conductive liquids.
The energy
needed to run the Internet and other cloud computing storage systems is
estimated to represent around two percent of the world's total energy
consumption.
More than
half of that is spent on running fans to cool down electronics in servers,
which run hot, just like in personal computers.
Now a small
British startup-company, Iceotope, is proposing their liquid-based cooling
technology could dramatically cut the energy needed for cooling, while re-using
the heat taken out of the computers.
"If we
just look at the data centers - those factories of cats doing strange things on
YouTube - the latest research suggests that this year alone those will consume
43 gigawatts of energy. It's the equivalent to around 90 medium-sized nuclear
power stations," Iceotope's Richard Barrington told DW.
"More
than half of that energy globally is used just to cool the computers,"
says Barrington. "So half of it is productive, the other half in one sense
is unproductive. And then all the heat that is actually generated at the moment
is just thrown away."
Barrington
believes using liquid rather than air cooling could be more than 1,000 times more
energy efficient, saving data storage companies money and reducing their carbon
footprint.
It would
represent a reduction in energy used for cooling of between 80 and 97 percent.
Immersing
electronics
Anyone who
has used a laptop will know how hot even a small computer can get.
 |
| Iceotope's Jon Summers (right) and Richard Barrington (left) |
Although
using fans to cool electronics down is not particularly efficient, it is the
solution used in most of the world's computers.
Iceotope
teamed up with researchers at the University of Leeds in the North of England
to investigate how to immerse the heat-generating electronics in a liquid,
which would not damage them.
"We
use a liquid which has a high dielectric strength - it doesn't conduct
electricity," explained Dr Jon Summers at the school of mechanical
engineering at the University of Leeds.
To
demonstrate, he filled a beaker with the liquid and sank a mobile telephone
into it.
"It's
a fully operational mobile phone. And one of the things we can do to test that
it is still alive is to ring it while it's inside the liquid," explained
Dr Summers. The mobile telephone did indeed still work, and appeared entirely
undamaged when taken back out of the liquid.
Closed, recyclable
system
Large data
centers can house hundreds, sometimes thousands of computer server racks.
A typical
server rack is the size of a wardrobe and houses around 40 individual servers -
large computers that are far more powerful than your household variety.
In the
Iceotope system each server is completely enclosed and the liquid is contained
within - just like a laptop computer filled with liquid rather than air.
The
servers' liquid cooling system links up when they are plugged in, and it only
takes an 80 watt pump to circulate the liquid around all of the servers in one
rack.
"The
system is a totally encapsulated solution, so the liquid is always there - it
doesn't evaporate," says Summers.
Other
liquid cooling systems submerge servers in big, open tanks of liquid, which are
prone to evaporation and are also incompatible with existing data centers.
Servers
heating buildings
But
slashing electricity usage for cooling is only one half of the solution the
Leeds researchers and Iceotope are looking at.
The heat
generating by the machines still has to go somewhere.
While fans
just blow hot air out of a building, this new system uses heat exchangers which
pass the heat picked up by the non-conductive cooling liquid over to a separate
loop, which uses ordinary water.
 |
Iceotope's liquid cooling is being used to cool two servers
systems - but it could soon be more |
"It is
low grade heat, but we find ways to use it," says Dr Nikil Kapur, who is
responsible for the project's heat recycling research. "It would be ideal
for space heating or underfloor heating for residential apartments. Other uses
for low grade heat includes things like greenhouses, tomato growing is one that
we often see."
The
Iceotope server installed at the University of Leeds heats up two conventional
radiators.
Arctic air
Data giants
like Google and Facebook are already looking at ways of slashing the enormous
costs of cooling their giant data centers. Google recently unveiled plans for
new data centers in the Arctic north, making use of the cooler air there.
Richard
Barrington from Iceotope welcomes the development, but believes Google's
solution too is unsustainable in the long run.
"We
can't put all the data centers in the far north," Barrington says.
"There
isn't sufficient capacity of people, power and floor space to do that. And we
still need data centers in the Middle East, in high temperature environments.
Emerging economies where they want to develop their own infrastructure, they're
not going to want to ship it out to Norway or Iceland."
So far
Iceotope has only installed two fully working liquid cooled server systems. One
at the University of Leeds and one at a university in Poland. It is not exactly
making a dent in the world's enormous computer energy consumption - yet.
But if this
technology can be proven to work on a large scale, and giants like Google and
Facebook come knocking, the future of global computing could be looking far
cheaper and greener than it is today.
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