Cooling down data centers with liquid cooling technology to support green transformation
Currently, the total scale of computing power in China is growing rapidly, ranking second in the world. By 2025, the computing power of national data centers will reach 3.3 times that of 2020. Accelerating the construction of green data centers has become a fundamental requirement for ensuring resource and environmental sustainability.
At present, the demand for AI servers is skyrocketing, but 80% -90% of data centers still use air-cooled cooling. Despite frequent energy-saving policies in data centers and a decrease in liquid cooling investment costs, there are still multiple difficulties in upgrading liquid cooling, and different industry issues are also different. "On June 28th, Ningchang held a media communication meeting, and Ningchang President Qin Xiaoning announced the launch of the" worry free Huanye Plan "to solve the problem of upgrading real data centers, Promote liquid cooling from 'luxury' to 'inclusive'. The rapid development of computing power has brought significant significance to strengthening, optimizing, and expanding the digital economy, as well as expanding new space for economic development. However, as its physical carrying data center, it is like smokeless steel mills, creating economic value while also bringing high energy consumption.
In this context, a series of documents such as the "Three Year Action Plan for the Development of New Data Centers (2021-2023)" and the "14th Five Year Plan for the Development of Digital Economy" have made arrangements to promote the construction of green digital centers, including "accelerating the energy-saving transformation of data centers, continuously improving the level of renewable energy utilization in data centers" and "reducing the PUE of newly built large and above data centers to below 1.3 by the end of 2023". Therefore, green and low-carbon has become a new standard for data center construction. Liquid cooling, with its outstanding advantages in energy conservation and carbon reduction in the refrigeration field, has become an important choice for provincial-level data center construction. Currently, liquid cooling technology mainly includes two forms: indirect cooling and direct cooling. The former refers to the use of cold plate liquid cooling, which directly attaches the metal water cooling plate to the CPU and GPU, and carries out heat through liquid flow. The latter is the use of immersion liquid cooling, which directly immerses the server motherboard in electronic fluoride solution. When the operating temperature of the CPU rises, the surrounding refrigerant temperature is heated to produce a vaporization phase change. During the phase change process, the refrigerant absorbs a large amount of latent heat.
Compared with traditional air cooling technology, the thermal conductivity of liquid is 25 times that of air, and the heat carried away by the same volume of liquid is nearly 3000 times that of the same volume of air; Secondly, at the same heat dissipation level, the liquid cooled noise level is reduced by 20-35 decibels compared to the air cooled noise level. In terms of power consumption, data shows that liquid cooling systems save about 30-50% of electricity compared to air cooling systems. Although the technology is good, traditional data centers still face many challenges in the process of transitioning from "wind" to "liquid".
