LIQUID COOLING FOR THERMAL MANAGEMENT OF DATA CENTERS

摘要

The power trend for Server systems continues to grow thereby making thermal management of Data centers a very challenging task. Although various configurations exist, the raised floor plenum with Computer Room Air Conditioners (CRACs) providing cold air is a popular operating strategy. The air cooling of data center however, may not address the situation where more energy is expended in cooling infrastructure than the thermal load of data center. Revised power trend projections by ASHRAE TC 9.9 predict heal load as high as 5000W per square feet of compute servers' equipment footprint by year 2010. These trend charts also indicate that heat load per product footprint has doubled for storage servers during 2000-2004. For the same period, heat load per product footprint for compute servers has tripled. Amongst the systems that are currently available and being shipped, many racks exceed 20kW. Such high heat loads have raised concerns over limits of air cooling of data centers similar to air cooling of microprocessors. Thermal management of such dense data center clusters using liquid cooling is presented.