In college (circa 1988-1990), we were solving heat transfer problems related to cooling supercomputers or even individual chips. Supposedly, these chips and/or computer systems, were built to allow cool fluids to circulate through them - besides being air-cooled. And, supposedly, this was a field of study for up-and-coming problems in the world of supercomputers.
While this sounds improbable, what companies might be working to solve such problems? And, are any located in the mid-Atlantic? Can any computer hardware gurus give me the inside scoop on this or related issues to cooling today’s computers.
Thanks,
Isn’t this already a done deal? Crays have been liquid-cooled for a while. And I don’t think that anyone’s working on commercial liquid cooling systems for PCs. There, the work is towards better thermal conductors/electrical insulators to transfer the heat from the chip to the fan.
There are quite a few liquid cooling systems available for high end and overclocked PCs. Basic systems usually use water, whereas big supercomputers sometimes use a refrigerant and compressor, like a refrigerator.
I doubt any of the companies are located in the mid-Atlantic. While you’d have a large supply of water, salt water is damaging to just about everything. There’s also logistical problems with building, importing, and exporting stuff from floating platforms and/or boats. I’d think most of the plants would be based on land.
If there was a tongue-in-cheek smilie, this is where I’d put it.
The Cray used a chemically and electrically inert fluid which vame in direct contact with all the chips, boards, wires, etc. The whole interior of the computer was swimming in the stuff.
I once had the opportunity to visit a site that had the only (at the time?) third generation Cray. (I forgot the name, but is wasn’t Cray III.) At any rate, the front of the computer is a sort of waterfall of the fluorinert (contains fluorine) and almost a nice room centerpiece! The person giving the demonstration had a jar of used fluorinert and we got to dip a finger in it and feel it. It’s hard to explain the consistency, but I guess it was closest to the low viscocity yet slightly slippery feeling of lighter fluid.
Not only are there water cooled PC systems out there (and a lot of homebrew systems), Hitachi just released a water cooled P4 laptop.
I had for a while a homebrew water cooled AMD Athlon system. The water cooling doesn’t actually perform signifcantly better than air cooling with a good heatsink and lots of fans, but it is much quieter. It was hard to maintain, though. Eventually I just pulled it and put the computer in a separate room.
I work in a lab with lots of big multi-cpu servers, and they’re cooled in different ways. Some of the more interesting ones have a somewhat liquid cooled system which acts as a passive refrigerant. Tubes go from a block bolted on top of the processor to a big heatsink out away from the back of the machine. They’re filled with a refrigerant type liquid that heats up, carrying the heat to the heatsink, which cools it and this it condenses and flows back into the processor block.
Just like any heat pump, Peltier coolers only create a temperature gradient - that is, one side gets cold and the other side gets hot. It’s fine if you just need to cool one chip, but it doesn’t help you carry heat from the vicinity of the chip to the outside of the case. In fact the total amount of heat generated inside the case increases because the Peltier cooler itself uses power.
In any case, supercomputers these days son’t use huge chips that require extreme measures to keep cool. The trend is towards parallel processing, where hundreds or thousands of processors are used in parallel. Each processor is not much faster - and not much harder to cool - than the ones in high-end PCs.
is the new solid state coolers called