Ultra-high density Green Data Centers
Opportunity
Computational power requirements is rising due to higher workload demands in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Today’s high-performance computing (HPC) will be the future regular data centers and temperature management in a data center will be very crucial for its proper and efficient working. Air cooled data centers will be unable to provide sufficient cooling capacity when rack power density > 25kW per rack. Several cooling techniques can be implemented to maintain essential temperature and prevent data center from over-heating and humidity. However, existing techniques require bulky infrastructure such as ducting networks, huge fans, tanks and multiple chillers and CRAC units for servers to operate. These infrastructure and cooling systems take up a lot of space and consumes a lot of energy. It is estimated that such cooling system accounts up to 37% of the total energy usage in a data center.
The green data center market was worth 49.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2020 and is expected to grow to over 140 billion U.S. dollars by 2026.
Technology
The present invention illustrates an Ultra-High Density Green Data Center, achieved by the implementation of a hybrid cooling technology that eliminates the need of having a raised flooring structure, overhead plenum. Further, the invention removes the bulky ducting networks needed for conventional cooling systems. This facilitates accommodation of more servers in the same space, thus enabling ultra-high density.
The invention comprises of an effective hybrid cooling technology which has increased energy efficiency by using a combination of liquid and air as cooling agents for specific heat dissipating components, where high heat flux dissipating components such as CPUs and GPUs are cooled by single/two-phase liquid and low heat flux dissipation components such as memory sticks and power supplies are cooled by air. This hybrid cooling system allows the data center to operate at high ambient temperature and does away with the need for raised flooring (supply air) and overhead plenum (return air), thereby freeing up the space to support an increased number of server racks per floor. With the eliminating of the need for energy-consuming chillers and CRAC units, the invention and its improved the cooling efficiency can lead to the creation ultra-low power utilization efficiency (PUE) data centers.
