Servers Too Hot? Intel Recommends a Luxurious Oil Bath
This of course looks very cool, but to me it does not seem practical besides edge-cases, even though the technology is not new in any way, high-powered transformers which you find in power plants, for example, are oil-filled since basically forever.
The practical problems on the other hand are not to be ignored: The oil needs to be kept rather clean, otherwise it will loose its good insulation properties, hence you need sealed containers or purification devices, in industrial scale deployments this means keeping an eye on the chemical composition of your coolant by regular chemical analysis.
Connectors and cables need to be really oil-tight, otherwise the oil will creep out through cables hanging out of a closed vessel (even if they go higher than the oil-surface)!
It's not an efficient technology in terms of the amount of coolant that is used: You put everything into the oil-bath, both the high-energy-density components (CPU, graphics-card, maybe chipsets, fast RAM), regardless of their energy consumption: Imagine a full data center, you'd basically need thousands of cubic meters of pure, constantly filtered oil... For the good old cray-computer often used as an example it was different: There computing was spread out over a vast number of logic gates that deposited their waste heat over a really high volume.
The examples I have seen (casemodders being a good example) were also rather generous with container-size and amount of coolant where enough circulation and cooling was provided by natural convection. "Professionally", one would use this technology for a reason, hence in devices that are even more densly packed than usual blade-centers and there I expect issues with forced circulations of warm/hot oil just as we have hot/cold air distribution nowadays.
A technology like currently deployed water-cooled devices, where the majority of heat is collected by water at the concentration points (mainly CPU) and air is taking care of the (much reduced) remains seems much more sensible to me.
I built a mineral oil PC a couple of years ago.
I epoxied the motherboard mount from an old computer case to some wood and then stuck the wood to the inside of a cheap fish tank. I installed the computer sans harddrive and then poured in 12 liters of mineral oil that I'd bought from a vet (Vet's use it as a horse laxative).
It resulted in a perfectly silent system but because I didn't cover the top it was also a really effective fly trap. Within a few months there were a bunch of dead flies floating at the top of the tank. Also the weight made it a real effort to move around and no matter how careful I was there was always a mess when I needed to swap out or adjust a part.
Still it was a lot of fun to build and I used it as my primary machine for about a year.
It's fascinating that I heard about homebrewers doing this kind of thing around a decade ago (although I believe they were keeping the hard drives un-submerged rather than sealing them up) yet this is only now being considered "cutting edge" as a commercial option.
Reminds me of a Bioshock Casemod from a few years ago[0]. From what the creator said, it doesn't even sound that expensive.
0: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dmrpv/bioshock_miner...
I really cannot understand why this is not more prevalent. The cost savings of not having air conditioning for a datacenter should be well worth any mess of oil.
Midas Green Tech, anyone? http://www.midasgreentech.com
According to the article, Intel recommends removing the grease between the processor and the heat sink. Question: Why does it need a heat sink if it's being cooled by oil?
I recently saw a video about a similar implementation at an annual conference in Germany for PC modders that won first place. It looked pretty awesome, the whole PC box was immersed in a greenish liquid. You can see it here, it's at the end of the video after 8:33.
Interesting that supermicro is already moving towards putting these on the market. I hadn't heard of them until the other day with the etsy setup, but this looks very promising for future datacenters large and small...
Check out LiquidCool Solutions too. I think this type of technology could very well be the standard in the future. http://www.liquidcoolsolutions.com
No risk of short-circuits?
Mineral oil is a Group 1 carcinogen. Scope for some lucrative class-action litigation 10 years down the line when workers in data centres start developing carcinomas.