(Photo by Andre Renard, CHIME)
Free cooling Big players like Google and Facebook said they were tackling the problem. Annual electricity consumption increases from digital processing went from 90 percent per year in the first five years of the century, to 25 percent from 2005-2010 and then just four percent by 2015. Most of the early gains were made using free cooling by locating data centres up north and bringing in naturally cool air. IBM opened a 25,000 square foot data centre in Barrie, Ont. in 2016. The company expected to cool the facility for 210 days each year without the chillers, saving about 50 percent on energy. In some cases, remote free cooling data centres are located beside hydro dams, further increasing energy efficiencies, by minimizing transmission losses. This solution works for large firms, but there are thousands of small companies that cannot or will not lease
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computing power from a remote service bureau.
Slow progress Liquid cooling has been on the horizon at annual IT conferences for a decade or two but has made slow progress, likely because the idea of mixing liquids with electronics seems a little ‘out there.’ At the risk of being ridiculed someday, like the Prentice Hall editor in 1957, I’m willing to predict that some form of liquid cooling will dominate data centre cooling in the future. A handful of North American and European firms have been demonstrating highly successful projects. One of the most incredible astrophysical research facilities in the world is in Kaleden, B.C. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is the name for a radio telescope that maps the largest volume of space ever surveyed in history.
The system seals the liquid inside copper heat exchangers and tubes to avoid contact with the electronics. Heavy data crunching It’s called a telescope, but it looks like several snowboard half-pipes covering an area the size of five hockey rinks. At seven quadrillion computer operations per second, its volume is equivalent to the data flow through all the world’s mobile networks. It opened last year after five years in Please see ‘B.C. project’ on page 14
April 2018 – Plumbing & HVAC
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