Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Defense Dept Data Center Tries Direct-to-Chip Water Cooling


The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) will retrofit one of its data centers with direct-to-chip liquid-cooling technology from Asetek.

The $2 million project will use Asetek's RackCDU (Rack Coolant Distribution Unit) technology, which is a hot water, direct-to-chip, data center liquid cooling system that removes heat from CPUs, GPUs, memory modules and other hot spots within servers.  No power is used to chill the water.  The direct-to-chip cooling loops replace existing air heat sinks, with tubes exiting through an unused PCIe slot in the server chassis.

Johnson Controls Federal Systems is the installer and integrator for the project.

Asetek claims a more than 50% cooling cost savings.

“The Department of Defense has become very serious about improving data center efficiency, and they are seeking new approaches to address this mission-critical problem,” said Andre Eriksen, Asetek’s CEO and founder. “Hot water direct-to-chip liquid-cooling is a powerful approach that can capture more than 80% of the heat generated by a data center and remove it from the building, where it can be cooled for free by ambient air or even reused for building heating and hot water. No power what so ever goes in to actively chilling the water.”

http://www.asetek.com
http://www.asetek.com/press-room/news/386-asetekr-inc-selected-to-retrofit-major-dod-data-center-with-rackcdu-liquid-cooling.html

  • Asetek is headquartered in San Jose, California with offices in Denmark, China and Taiwan. The company was founded in 2000.