Intel - "Liquid Cooling to become essential in next generation servers?"

I recently came back from a training course at Intel and was glad to hear their increased focus on the requirement for liquid cooling in future servers and data-centers.

Moving forward Intel will continue to develop and offer products that have much higher TDPs than previous generations. (Thermal design power - effectively the CPU wattage, could be compared to a light bulb, in that the higher the TDP the hotter it gets and is therefore more difficult to cool). Future generation Intel products will contain more cores and new technologies which increase heat production and therefore mean that alternative cooling solutions such as liquid become far more important than today, where air cooling is the de-facto standard in servers.

Ultimately increasing density and the quest for smaller more powerful supercomputers has already pointed towards liquid cooling as a far superior option for lowering datacenter TCO and increasing CPU performance. In a previous article I talked a lot about the need to consider "free" cooling solutions (ie venting heated water to an outside heat exchanger), and a stage further re-using the heat in facilities (ie school heating system). Whilst it may be some time until this is the norm, we already see great examples on the market of disruptive companies providing solutions to make this possible. From server based radiators suited to home use to Oslo's hot water distribution system powered by a datacenter, there are many solutions out there today that have models which can be adapted for the data-centers (or distributed cloud computing platforms) of the future.

Whilst disruptive free cooling solutions are interesting, for the moment the key OEMs are scratching their heads around how to support this in their generationally developed air cooled chassis. I expect a lot of large OEMs to struggle to be time to market on such solutions. Of course I cannot go into too much detail as most of the information on next generation platforms is NDA. Let us just say I see the need for a server platform that can support way above today's TDPs, perhaps something that contains a very high quality liquid cooling system already, and has been tested in the field for some time, with demanding HFT customers.

Yes BlackCore is already prepared for this next generation, with our current chassis supporting the necessary TDP requirements from launch. This is where the cooling headroom on our dual processor platform comes into its own - today customers say "We are amazed at the CPUs running 35c flat out on our application". In the next generation we might not run quite as cool, but rest assured we will have the support needed to run some very exciting and disruptive processing solutions in a tested and validated chassis. Moving forward we are planning several customisations to our chassis designs, bringing new options into play for Enterprise applications, as well as further developing our HFT range propelling performance into the stratosphere. Watch out for more information on that with our next website launch planned for Nov this year.

In summary, liquid cooling is going to become an essential part of many IT managers, Datacenter strategists and CTO's strategies. Here at BlackCore we are seasoned veterans with liquid cooling ready for the next generation, and are working closely with Intel and other vendors on pre-validating these products. Drop us a line if you wish to align your road-map with ours or just want to chat about future tech - it is our passion!

Mark Laurence - CTO, BlackCore Technologies