Liquid cooling, where the future is headed

[tangor]

Hype around liquid and immersion cooling has reached a fever pitch in recent months, and it appears that the colocation datacenter market is ready to get in on the action.

Recently, Zachary Smith, Equinix's global head of edge infrastructure services, told The Register that the outfit would like to offer customers more liquid and immersion cooling capabilities, but blamed a lack of standards for getting in the way.

[theregister.com...]

While standards are not yet consistent, liquid cooling is very capable and produces performance and longevity benefits. Read an article not too long ago that one of g's datacenters (Idaho/Oregon? somewhere in that area) was running through 247ish million gallons per year (in drought prone locale). Not very practical for ordinary laptops---and of no use at all for mobile---concentrated computer clusters can certainly benefit from liquidification!

[csdude55]

If I'm understanding the concept correctly, this is the same technology used for nuclear reactors for, what, 70 years? So it's not like we have to start from scratch, we already know what does and doesn't work.

Water turned seems like a poor choice for a coolant, though. Molten metal has worked well for reactors, so even though it's more expensive it would have fewer long term problems for datacenters.

Given time, I suspect that future technology will have us all paying a monthly fee for a central operating system, and our computers and phones will just be consoles logging in to that central system. Literally no local storage other than caching.