The Ultimate Water-Cooling?

shazzam66 · May 21, 2013

As electronic technology moves ever onward, a problem it will continue to face (until some kind of alternative power is discovered, perhaps) is heat. Powerful computers and servers generate heat, and if the hardware gets too hot — as we all know — bad things begin to happen. In order to cope with the heating problem, Interexion, a European data center company, used a seawater-based cooling system for its data center in Stockholm, Sweden. In about a year, the experimental system already paid for itself, thanks to the low cost of seawater. In fact, the company only spent around one million dollars on the system in total, which in terms of huge data centers, isn’t really that much.

The system is so efficient, that it actually saved around the cost of building it — the aforementioned one million dollars — after only a year of operation. Using the seawater only costs around three cents per kilowatt hour. The seawater is quite cold to begin with, entering the system just below 43 degrees Fahrenheit, and cools three sites. By the time the water runs through all three sites, it exits the system at around 75 degrees Fahrenheit — a temperature of a comfortable spring afternoon. Excess heat that is created is sent off to a heating system that is used to warm up businesses and homes.

However, nothing is ever perfect, and the system has something of an unseen flaw: jellyfish. Interexion is occasionally forced to cease operations of the pump by the government, and thus the cooling system, due to environmental hazards. Exactly why hasn’t been made clear, but CEO Lex Coors believes it’s because of the jellyfish. He didn’t clarify, and he could just have the most fantastic, deadpan humor in the data center cooling business — a business surely filled with the most quick-witted, sharp-tongued people the world has ever seen — but if not, it’s probably safe to assume that the pumps suck up a bunch of the surrounding sea life.

Google actually has a server farm cooled with seawater, but unlike Interexion’s method, it only runs through one facility, whereas Interexion’s manages to cool three. Even if the pumps are the greatest threat the jellyfish population has ever known, the company doesn’t have to shut them down all the time, so this experimental cooling process could spread to other parts of the world. Interexion is aiming to use the system with other seas, and even cold rivers sometime in the future.

Source: http://www.geek.com/science/seawater-cooling-saves-data-center-1-million-but-is-susceptible-to-jellyfish-1555705/