Intel has announced a new partnership that will see the company expand its exploration of liquid immersion cooling, a technique whereby server hardware is immersed in reservoirs of non-conductive liquid.
The company will work with liquid immersion company Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) to address several challenges facing the data center industry today, from a performance, cost and sustainability perspective.
Both will develop custom solutions for racks equipped with Intel Xeon processors and will work together to ensure that new dielectric fluids entering the market are safe to use and compatible with hardware developments.
Liquid immersion cooling
Although liquid immersion dates back to 1985, when it was implemented in the Cray-2 supercomputer, the technique has gained increasing interest in recent years as data center operators seek more durable and efficient means of maintaining their equipment. fresh.
Traditionally, facilities managed by cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud have relied on air conditioning and liquid cooling. But these methods are inefficient, expensive, and resource-intensive, especially when facilities are located in tropical climates.
Liquid immersion cooling is not only more environmentally friendly (because very little power is required), but recent research also suggests that the technique also has a number of performance advantages, thanks to superior thermal management.
It also opens up opportunities in rack design and facility layout. Because bulky heat sinks are no longer needed, more servers can be placed in a much smaller area.
According to Intel, their new partnership will help deliver "breakthrough technologies" that deliver greater efficiency and density for data centers and edge deployments, in addition to environmental benefits.
“Through this collaboration, we are able to provide customers with customized solutions to meet their computing and cooling needs to ensure data centers operate in a more environmentally friendly manner,” said Mohan Kumar, Senior Fellow at Intel.
The deal with GRC is the second such partnership announced by Intel in recent months. In August, the company partnered with Submer, another liquid immersion cooling company, to establish open, industry-standard solutions to support the next generation of data centers.
Through Tom's Hardware