Enough hot air: the role of immersion cooling

Energy Informatics

Review

Brian Setz¹  Kawsar Haghshenas¹  Yannis Blosch²  Marco Aiello² 

[1] Bernoulli Institute, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands;Service Computing Department, IAAS, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany;

关键词: Air cooling;    Data center;    Immersion cooling;    Power density;    Maintenance;    Power usage efficiency;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s42162-023-00269-0

 received in 2023-07-01, accepted in 2023-07-31,  发布年份 2023

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

Air cooling is the traditional solution to chill servers in data centers. However, the continuous increase in global data center energy consumption combined with the increase of the racks’ power dissipation calls for the use of more efficient alternatives. Immersion cooling is one such alternative. In this paper, we quantitatively examine and compare air cooling and immersion cooling solutions. The examined characteristics include power usage efficiency (PUE), computing and power density, cost, and maintenance overheads. A direct comparison shows a reduction of about 50% in energy consumption and a reduction of about two-thirds of the occupied space, by using immersion cooling. In addition, the higher heat capacity of used liquids in immersion cooling compared to air allows for much higher rack power densities. Moreover, immersion cooling requires less capital and operational expenditures. However, challenging maintenance procedures together with the increased number of IT failures are the main downsides. By selecting immersion cooling, cloud providers must trade-off the decrease in energy and cost and the increase in power density with its higher maintenance and reliability concerns. Finally, we argue that retrofitting an air-cooled data center with immersion cooling will result in high costs and is generally not recommended.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

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