new orleans – it’s been a decade since cooling vendors began predicting that power densities would force servers to be cooled by liquid rather than cool air. instead, the industry has seen major advances in the efficiency of air cooling, while liquid cooling has been largely confined to specialized computing niches.
experts in high performance computing say that will begin to change over the next three to five years due to increased data-crunching requirements of scientific research, cloud computing, and big data. a key driver is the hpc community’s bid to super-charge the processing power of supercomputers, creating exascale machines that can tackle massive datasets. the exascale effort is driven to a large extent by the u.s. government, which spends tens of millions annually on grants for research in exascale computing.
“in the hpc world, everything will move to liquid cooling,” said paul arts, technical director eurotech. “in our vision, this is the only way to get to exascale. we think this is the start of a new generation of hpc, with enormous power. we are just at the beginning of the revolution.”
a recent report by 451 group said liquid cooling was making somewhat of a comeback outside of the world of scientific computing too. more and more non-scientific workloads are approaching the level of compute power previously reserved for research.
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