Page 4 - Spring 2024
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THE GREAT COOLING DEBATE
A particularly topical area of data centre anticipated workloads, facilities can maintain
management at present is that of cooling, optimal performance without resorting to
which was reflected in a number of Data specialised liquid cooling systems. ‘
Centre World’s 80-plus presentations.
Central to the debate is whether data centres FlaktGroup argue that the vast majority of
should be cooled primarily by air, water or racks within data centres are still operating
liquid spray. below 30kW and that this ‘ can be comfortably
managed by air movement ‘. Only over 30kW
Exhibitor FlaktGroup (Reference: Data Centre rack densities would liquid begin to support
Review, Spring 2024, p.19, ‘The Latent Power air-based systems.
of Air’) clearly advocates air cooling, as
evidenced by the following narrative: In the same journal (Reference: Jackson, L.,
‘Cooling the Compute-intensive Future’, p22)
“Air, or more accurately, the movement of Liam Jackson, Senior Director at Red Helix,
air, is so versatile that if ( a small word that argues that liquid cooling solutions can be
embodies big engineering ) managed particularly effective at driving cost and
properly, is more than capable of taking on energy efficiencies:
the evolving cooling needs of modern data
centres today and in the future. It is true that “Typically, data centres have relied on HVAC
these data centres now have, and will continue systems to cool their equipment, using
to have, diverse cooling demands of AI and ML a cycle of refrigerant compression and
applications. However, these tasks can easily decompression to create a thermal exchange
be handled with advanced air cooling systems mechanism. This cooling is a critical process
and methodologies. The notion that superior as the immense heat generated by servers
performance is exclusive to liquid cooling and computer systems can quickly lead to
solutions in data centres is incorrect.” hardware malfunctions if not adequately
managed - as evidenced by the Google server
The overarching strategy in data centre
outages during the 2022 heatwave.”
management has always been to distribute
workloads to alleviate hot spots and ensure The issue is that these HVAC systems aren’t
uniform cooling at the desired set-point. This very efficient. They depend on electric pumps
strategy has always been supported by air- to facilitate the compression process, which
based systems. The distributed workloads
are constantly running, translating into
have become , and will continue to become,
substantial energy consumption.
more complex with AI/ML, but by thoughtful
design of the data centre halls relative to Air cooling is also not particularly well
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