Mayfield Heights’ Park Place Technologies and Wickliffe’s Lubrizol joined together to start offering immersion cooling, which would let data centers ditch air conditioning and fans, and replace them with large tanks of specialized liquid — which the servers sit in full time.
“The first people to do that were very brave,” said Mark Rees, Lubrizol’s vice president of new business development. Most people wouldn’t dunk their phone in liquid, yet these servers can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Data center is sort of an umbrella term. One can fill up a whole building or be small enough for just one room. But data centers are generally large, unassuming rooms built to house computer systems that either handle storage, or telecommunications.
The large ones have rows of equipment either on shelves or in cabinets that hold and process information for all sorts of purposes.
While it may sound counterintuitive, the companies say submerging servers is actually more effective at cooling them down than other methods. And it’s cheaper in the long run.
HOW DOES IMMERSION COOLING WORK?
Data centers and computer chip manufacturers are at an inflection point, said Christopher Carreiro, Park Place Technologies’ chief technology officer. One way to describe the problem is by comparing it to another breakthrough — the Porsche 996.
Porsche’s 911 sports cars had reached the limits of their potential. With an air-cooled engine, they could only produce so much horsepower. Air alone could only transfer heat so quickly. Then in 1997 came the type 996, which held Porsche’s first 911 sports car with a water-cooled engine.
Carreiro said CPUs and GPUs are in a similar situation and are getting powerful enough that air cooling may not be enough. Data centers use some water cooling, which they do by running pipes filled with water next to chips. But that solution can only target certain parts and not a whole server at once.
With an immersion tank, entire servers can be dunked in liquid, where Lubrizol’s specialized chemicals can cool off entire systems at once.
Carreiro said liquid can transfer more heat than air alone. With specialized tanks and a heat exchanger, data centers can future proof their cooling needs.
They can also save a ton on their electricity bills.
RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Data centers are rated by how much power they use. A 1,000-kilowatt hour data center, for example, has 1,000 kilowatt hours of computing power.
But that data center uses about 1,700 kilowatts of electricity each hour, because 40 percent to 50 percent of a company’s electricity bill is air conditioning, Carreiro said.
The same data center with immersion cooling would use about 1,030 kilowatts each hour, he said, a huge cut to the electricity bills.
Lubrizol’s CompuZol immersion fluid is the key because it’s dielectric, which means it can’t conduct electricity. This non-water liquid won’t rust or damage the servers and computer parts, but it will cool them off.
The closest thing in your home to a non-water, dielectric fluid is motor oil or cooking oil. But to be clear, motor and cooking oil will not work to cool off your electronics.
Shreyasi Lahiri, a leader in Lubrizol’s immersion cooling business, said many tests had to be done on this fluid, which the company first started working on in 2019 to cool off electric-vehicle batteries.
They had to make sure the fluid didn’t degrade over time, see how it would work with new and old pieces of computer equipment (think floating cables) and figure out how often to “change the oil” or refill the tank.
Setting up these immersion tanks is an odd sight.
All of the data centers’ individual parts — like hard drives, CPUs and cables -- are tightly assembled onto a racks.
Then a small crane lowers these 300- to 400-pound servers into the immersion tanks, which look like high-tech chest freezers.
From there, the liquid cools the servers and a heat exchanger transfers the warmth out of the tank. From there, the heat can be sent out of the building or collected and repurposed.
Carreiro said there are some drawbacks. Instead of walking up to a server to find and fix a part, the whole server must be taken out of the immersion tank. Workers also need extra protective gear and more training.
Being in the tanks means parts break less, Carreiro said. They take up less space since they’re packed tightly together. And with the reduced electricity bills the technology can pay for itself within a year’s time.
Lubrizol developed the fluid and officially launched the product in 2021, while Park Place Technologies is managing the service and implementation of immersion cooling for clients.
And while data centers may switch for the cost savings, they’ll have to use immersion cooling for the higher-end computer chips of the future.
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