liquid cooling, immersion in particular, got another vote as seen in this piece in the minnesota post:

3m began promoting a potentially innovative new cooling technology tuesday that it said is designed for the “data center of the future.”

in partnership with intel corporation and sgi, maplewood-based 3m pioneered what it describes as “revolutionary two-phase immersion cooling technology,” which it claims can increase supercomputer efficiency, reduce cooling energy costs by 95 percent, and reduce water consumption for data centers.

3m, intel, and sgi developed a fully functional supercomputer in order to test the new cooling system. the sgi supercomputer, equipped with intel’s processing hardware, was placed directly into 3m’s “novec engineered fluid” in order to cool the supercomputer  ....  read the full story here at the minnesota post .

there are two key take aways from that full article:  the partnership and the fluid used, “novec engineered fluid” from 3m.

intel has been working immersion cooling at least as far back as 2012 with its work with oil, (see article, "intel embraces submerging servers in oil").  so, this isn't new ground for them.  perhaps the oil approach wasn't effective or deemed undesireable in some other way.  the current project, called ice x, (see more at computerworld here) is the partnership between intel, sgi and 3m.   the ice x prototype uses novec, more on that in a minute.  does it work?  this piece from tech radar reports that:

the project combines sgi's ice x distributed memory supercomputer with intel xeon e5-2600 processors placed directly in 3m's novec engineered fluid.

this fluid acts as an efficient dielectric, cooling hardware without the need for municipal water that is typically used in evaporative cooling.

the result is a staggering 95 per cent reduction in cooling energy costs, a significant reduction in water consumption, and a 10 times reduction in required space compared to conventional air cooling.

if that was not enough, heat generated from the system can even be harvested and reused to heat other technologies like desalination of sea water.

"as the backbone of the data economy, modern data centers must increase the raw performance they deliver, but also do so efficiently by containing power consumption and operating costs," said charles wuishpard, vp of the data center group and gm of workstation and high performance computing at intel.

by all measures, that is a successful prototype of immersion cooling.   but what about the fluid type that is being used, novec by 3m?

novec is a proprietary fluid from 3m that is used in fire supression systems.  but, it has application in data center cooling.  phil hughes from clustered systems included it in his talk at the 2014 hpcac stanford hpc & exascale conference.  the fluid has the following positives:

• isothermal
• can be used in single or two-stage systems
• electrically non-conductive
• low viscosity, low pumping energy
• high co-effficient of expansion supports convection
• non-flammable

and a few downsides:

• may be expensive depending on your application
  
• low thermal conductivity
• turbulent flow needed to break boundary layer
• heat flux limit, 15w/cm2

while the experiment from intel, sgi and 3m is proprietary, novec can be deployed partnering with icetope or liquid cool solutions.

so immersion liquid cooling gets another vote, perhaps one day an entire datacenter will be sealed and filled to get the performance necessary to meet the growing needs of computing power.  to read more on immersion liquid cooling, see our article, "direct liquid immersion cooling for high power density microelectronics"