alt Hacker NewsMaybe 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.
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> 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.
It seemed like a pretty big deal ~ 2011 when big companies were running their (air cooled) datacenters closer to 95F (35C) vs the traditional 72F (22C). So jumping up a little more is maybe not super exciting, but it's still innovation.
You have to design your hardware to tolerate being run in consistently hotter conditions. There's a tradeoff between cooling cost and failure rate / capex.
Speculating here - “effectively” cooling the CPU and GPU materially using this technique at datacenter scale may have never been done. Those things than run hot, easily crossing 100C. So the loop is doing a lot of work to keep them stable at 55C.
The innovation may be in the speed or volume flow of the coolant through different parts of the data centre to regulate the temperature. And of course, redesigning every component to be compatible with this fan-less design.
I think it’s only possibly because NVIDIA is much more vertically integrated than ever before.
There's never been a reason a sealed water-cooled system ever had to use vast amounts of water. But State Of The Art wound up being using and expelling the water. It seems like data centers operate like other industrial enterprises - locate in the city/county/state that gives you carte blanche, do whatever is convenient, get used to the idea that this the only way things can be done.
So a multitude of communities rebelling and complaints about environmental damage fell on deaf ears but a technical spec might be paid attention to.
Is this not how it was already done? Huh.
Ai slop from Nvidia, who would have thunk.
The "innovation" is that everything is now attached to a watercooled block.
The rest is marketing: The Cray supercomputer were fluid cooled back in the 1980's, the entire board had an inert liquid flowing across it.