Cooling

Computing hardware transforms electrical energy into heat. The consumed energy by a system will dissipate as heat and must be transported away. While electric components are designed to function within their operating temperature for a certain time, all electronics suffer from wear due to heat. This is why it is essential to have proper cooling in place, since otherwise it could reduce their lifetime.

There are two main ways to cool a system, either through air or through liquid cooling.

Air Cooling

With air, the cool air from the data center is pushed through the system. Data centers usually try to keep the temperature around or below 21 degrees celsius, but also need to ensure that the air isn’t too dry, since that would cause static electricity to build up which can damage your systems.

Liquid Cooling

The other way is liquid cooling, which due to the increasing amount of density in many data centers, is becoming more wide spread. Liquids are much more efficient in transporting heat away from electrical components and reduce the amount of energy needed for cooling. Since large heat sinks and fans are not required these systems support much denser CPU and GPU configurations.

direct-to-chip liquid cooling: a coolant is pushed into the system and brought directly to hotest components of the system
one-phase immersion liquid cooling: the entire system is submerged in special liquid, which is cooled with a heat exchanger
two-phase immersion liquid cooling: the entire system is submerged in a special liquid, which boils, evaporates to a gas and condenses back to liquid when it contacts a water-filled chilled condenser coils