Oil cooling: Deep fried, or deep energy savings?

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Enthusiasts have been using extreme cooling solutions for years, including water cooling loops, full submersion oil, and Peltier coolers. These setups have allowed DIY builders to run heavily overclocked systems without cooking their hardware, but have generally been been too esoteric to appeal to the enterprise world

Demand for data centers to pack more hardware into the same amount of space has increased the electrical and monetary cost for air cooling to the point that it is prohibitively expensive. This situation has encouraged some companies to explore alternatives, such as full submersion oil cooling and water cooling.

By fully submerging the hardware, oil is better able to affect the transfer of heat from the components and out of the facility. Much like the home-built “aquarium PCs,” oil-cooled servers also have a pump to circulate the oil and a radiator to cool it down before it’s returned to the system. In that respect it is similar to watercooling — just without using water-blocks. Like water, oil has a higher specific heat capacity than air, meaning it can absorb more heat for a given volume of coolant.

Where oil-cooled servers differ from home setups is in the scale, as data centers require massive radiators and heat exchange cooling stages. These systems use oils that are specially engineered dielectric fluids that do not conduct electricity, and in the case of Hardcore Computer’s Core Coolant oil it features “1,350 times greater heat rejection capacity by volume than air.” 3M’s Fluorinert is another popular choice for liquid cooling as it is many times more efficient than air.

Some companies such as Green Revolution Computing allow companies to overhaul their existing blade servers and then submerge them vertically in a large container of oil. The oil would then be circulated by a pump through a radiator located outside of the building. Boston, another oil cooling company, also offers pre-configured, hot-swappable micro blade servers running two Xeon 5600 CPUs that can slide into server racks. They utilize a series of pipes on the rear of the rack to pump oil through each blade where the internal hardware is cooled by oil. In either case, oil cooling the servers enables the data centers to pack more hardware into the same amount of space.

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Nowhere in this article does it list the corrosion risk of water. Even distilled water has a tendency to dissolved chemicals in the air, such as oxygen for example, and ruin your equipment through oxidation.

Some oils, on the other hand can be made to be very inert. The oil can be in direct contact with the circuitry and cool more safely and efficiently.

Agreed, submerging servers in distilled water would be a bad idea ;). As far as I understand, distilled water would be okay at first, but after a matter of days or more, the distilled water would start to pull ions away from the metal in the hardware and wreak all sorts of havoc.

Anonymous

From what I’ve read, distilled water is almost non-conductive, and doesn’t promote rust – until it has other chemicals/ions dissolved in it. (For the benefit of others who may be reading the comments)

I was initially thinking of just what it would dissolved from the air (IE oxygen) but admittedly, I have no idea what it would do with the variety of elements it would be exposed to on a computer motherboard. It sounds disastrous.

Just dunk that sucker in a vat of circulating oil and forget about it.

unfortunately cooking oil isn’t very good at cooling relative to the more expensive/specialty stuff, and I think mineral oil would make some gross tasting fries :P So I’m envisioning using a small radiator hooked up to a few server racks and using it as an outdoor grill for steak instead lol! hehe jk

I ran bi-distilled water in my PC for a few years. Had it spray out all over my motherboard, ram and front bay DVD and molex when a hard disk waterblock tube disconnected in my hand (it was a crap design waterblock – not like the new ones). The computer didn’t even crash or restart. These days I use Thermochill EC6 which is made from vegetables. Electrically inert even after many many months and I don’t have to worry about pond life growing in the tubes.

On the other hand I know people who used Feser UV coolant that when leaked out destroyed a motherboard immediately even with a small leak. Feser UV is 10 x more electrically conductive than straight bi-distilled water.

timverry

O wow, I would have been panicking had that happened to me! I do have a watercooling loop in my system now and in the back of my mind I’m always worried something is going to happen ;)

Anonymous

Remember kids, don’t submerge your spinning hard drive in mineral oil. Classic rookie mistake. The armature head needs to float above the platters on a cushion of air generated by the turbulence of the spinning platters, and there’s a hole in the hard drive with an air filter to equalize the air pressure as the drive heats up.

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Hi Chris, thanks for stopping by. The only big downside I see about maintaining them is when it dr comes to replacing faulty hardware, any insight on how that process would work? Or would you guys just let that blade drip dry out and swap in a backup blade? :)

Anonymous

Swap.
I think the likes of IBM and HP are no longer required for most server applications, cheap commodity computing in the data center is the way forward. Google and Facebook already do this, why not the other 500…

I. B. Halliwell

Well, it looks like PC type computers are finally catching up to the 1980’s . . . OK, maybe that isn’t fair, but Cray Research, Inc came out with a submerged computer in the 1980s!! Yeah, 30 years ago! I worked for almost 10 years for Cray and I’ll say the Cray 2 was an awesome system for the times.

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