OCP Global Summit 2024 Series

We've touched on the power innovations at the summit, so obviously, the next logical step is to talk about cooling.

Cooling

If there is one thing I noticed this year, was the surge in companies expanding their portfolios to include more end-to-end cooling solutions. In previous years and conferences, if was more common to see one company specializing in cold plates, another in CDUs (Coolant Distribution Units), and someone else in immersion tanks.

As a customer, you'd then have to integrate these components into brownfield data center's, using an existing air handler or heat exchanger with a generic cooling tower. Now, companies like Supermicro , Aorus, Vertiv , and 英业达 are offering vertically integrated solutions that cover the entire cooling spectrum.

Inventec’s Vertical Immersion Cooling Solutions

英业达 presented their vertical immersion cooling solutions, offering an interesting take on the traditional bathtub or tank design. By reimagining the physical orientation, they’re addressing some of the limitations of conventional immersion cooling systems. This innovative approach could lead to improved efficiency and scalability in data center cooling.

Alibaba’s Liquid-Cooled Switches Scaling to 51.2T

Alibaba Cloud shared insights into their liquid-cooled switches as they scale to 51.2 Tbps devices. Return Infrastructure-as-a-Newsletter readers will remember that this topic has surfaced in previous conferences, but as I’ve been emphasizing, everything is pulling more power and, therefore, producing more heat. Switches have a tiny surface area (typically just one rack unit), making air cooling increasingly challenging. This is why I’m so bullish on immersion cooling—you can literally throw everything into the tank to manage cooling effectively.

(The man in red) Rolf Brink discusses these developments in his presentation, highlighting how the community is growing and the strides being made in immersion cooling technologies. It’s encouraging to see collaborative efforts pushing the industry forward.

Practical Immersion Cooling and Sustainable Practices

There were also fascinating discussions about practical immersion cooling, sustainability initiatives with heat reuse, and even the use of seawater in Portugal.

Immersion Heat Sinks: Addressing Thermal Challenges

A lot of important work is being done across the industry on immersion heat sinks. Two to three years ago, natural convection worked well for GPUs in the NVIDIA A100 era. However, when you’re packing eight H100s into a highly dense SKU (less than 4U), you encounter hot spotting because the fluid can’t move the heat off the chip die + heatsink quickly enough. Submer ’s team developed an elegant solution last year, a Forced Convection heatsink, and many others—like UNICOM Engineering and 英特尔 —have created immersion-first heatsinks to dissipate heat more effectively.

Engineering Insights into Immersion Cooling

For the thermal engineers reading this, Andrew Richenderfer from The Lubrizol Corporation brought some compelling R&D data showing how both natural and forced convection work with immersion heat sinks. It’s truly fascinating to see the relationships between fluids with different viscosities and the resulting performance improvements.

Stay tuned for the final article in the series.