Using Jet Engines to Cool Servers 109
rpmsci writes "The computer servers that fill huge data centers are producing more heat with every new generation of processors. It's a problem that's sending engineers on a search for cooling fans that are both small enough to fit inside ever-smaller server chassis and powerful enough to dispel increasing amounts of heat. At Hewlett-Packard, they've found one answer in an unexpected place: model jet airplanes."
Too Late (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Too Late (Score:1)
Re:Too Late (Score:2)
About these fans (Score:1)
Re:Too Late (Score:3, Funny)
Not the same thing (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, the HP one uses small blades that are shorter and that spin faster. As such they create more thrust/airflow and reduce noise that normal blades produce from the tips of their blades.
RTFA, it's got a good discription, yeah, I know it's
Re:Not the same thing (Score:2)
How they work. (Score:5, Informative)
That's about all the article says.
The key ingredient to a ducted fan is efficient expansion. Any old array of twisted parts can propell air. I read another article and fabricated such a thing from Dixie cups. After your rotor comes the stator, a very important component missing from ordinary fans, which removes the angular component of the flow velocity. You want to move the air down your axis not around it. Getting the air moving along the axis and expanding it out to larger volumes without wasting your effort is hard to do. Adding any stator will help. Doing it quietly and efficiently is one of those rocket science things.
Wikipedia, of course, has a quick article, [wikipedia.org]
and Google turns up an easy design text [pair.com].Re:Not the same thing (Score:2)
On the other hand neither technology is even remotely related to jet engines in the normal sense of the word and both are really just electric fans. I probably wouldn't have bothered
Re:Not the same thing (Score:1)
http://www.asciimation.co.nz/beer/ [asciimation.co.nz]
Not a jet. (Score:4, Insightful)
I have to wonder how much if this is really just hype. Last time I looked at my cooling fan it was already a ducted fan.
Are they adding extra stages? Maybe more an more efficient airfoil on the fan blades? Longer duct? Higher RPM?
I find this a huge so what.
Re:Not a jet. (Score:1, Funny)
You mean "used to be available". Have you tried to order these after 9/11?
Re:Not a jet. (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, there's virtually no difference in availability:
And there's a whole bunch more here [airtoi.nl]. There's no shortage of gas turbine planes and pilots in our aeroclub [tmac.asn.au], either.
Backpressure and blade-pitch optimization. (Score:2)
It makes sense that this would be the case: if you think about how a jet engine is mounted, there's no backpressure on the exhaust stream aside from atmospheric pressure, which tends to be constant at the altitudes that RC planes fly. However, if you were to mount it so that the out-flow was restricted (because it's blowing into a computer chassis), then you'd need to redesign the blades. My initial
Re:Backpressure and blade-pitch optimization. (Score:2)
If you have too much back pressure you can have what is called a fan or compressor stall. The blades will stall just like a wing and well if you fly anything you know that bad things happen when airfoils stall.
You can get around stalling a few ways. By having a lot of stages by limiting the amount of compression in each stage I.E. limit the pitch of each of the fans. The high tech way is to change the pitch of the stat
Christ, is "active" a hip marketing term again? (Score:5, Funny)
Christ, is "active" a hip marketing term again? I thought "ActiveX" put a bullet in that fad...
Re:Christ, is "active" a hip marketing term again? (Score:3, Funny)
Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't imaging running a fleet of model airplane engines is going to be quite, cheap, or all that reliable. Especially when compared to an rack integrated water cooling system.
-Rick
Re:Why bother? (Score:1)
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Re:Why bother? (Score:2, Insightful)
The leak from the CPU block was such a small leak that it dripped sludge, as the wa
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Re:Why bother? (Score:1)
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
-Rick
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Informative)
I've never heard anything bad about it, and it works fine for me.
Hard Lesson (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hard Lesson (Score:2)
Re:Hard Lesson (Score:1)
Re:Why bother? (Score:1)
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Did you even TRY to look? I spent 10 seconds with google and this is on the first page of results:
Clicky [performance-pcs.com]
Here is the google URL so you can look further:
ClickyX2 [google.com]
Re:Why bother? (Score:1)
I've had an Asetek (http://www.frozencpu.com/ex-wat-72.html) cooling system installed in my box for almost 2 years now. I love it. Even running the thing at full processor load on both the video card and the processor (a p4 prescot), temperatures won't go more than 10 degrees above ambient. And yes, that's with very minimal fan noise.
Unfortunately, my system developed a leak too. The leak actually occurred on the chipset block, between the block and the fitting. It was a slow leak, but
My experience with water-cooling leak (Score:2)
In a smaller, more modern environment, the effect on other computers is going to depend on whether the cases let water leak from one to the next - e.g. in a stack of 1U, are there vents on the top and bottom or only sides -
Re:Why bother? (Score:3, Insightful)
If an enthusiast's system leaks, he misses the next LAN party. If it happend on the top computer on a rack, that system goes down. The water then trickes down to the next lower computer and destroys it. Maybe the water will go down to the next compu
Re:Why bother? (Score:1)
Re:Why bother? (Score:1)
Until it lands in the dust (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Tom
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
As for failure modes, water cooling isn't all cheap little toys with no engineering. With proper design and quality the critical fail
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Other posters have mentioned tapping the building cooling system directly, which is a clever idea that might work someday, but is completely unrealistic in a datacenter you're building today. There is no building sc
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Liquid cooling with HVAC chilled water (Score:3, Informative)
Large buildings generally don't circulate Freon from one floor to another, it would be too expensive. Instead, they have a big refrigeration unit (roof mounted, usually) with big cooling towers and the rest, and use it to chill water, which is pumped throughout the building and used to cool air.
It wouldn't be very difficult to tap i
Re:Liquid cooling with HVAC chilled water (Score:2)
Re:Liquid cooling with HVAC chilled water (Score:2)
-Rick
Re:Why bother? (Score:1)
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Re:Why bother? (Score:1)
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Err, my bust. The article mentions "Jets" numerous times, I mistakenly thought the electric part of the title was referring to the duct (in so form of control) and the jet was referring to the power source. I see now that it article was just craply written. Thanks for the clarification.
-Rick
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Re:Why bother? (Score:1)
you should hear about it in the next 6 months or so, but don't hold your breath on my account
Re:Why bother? (Score:1)
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
If rack-mount servers all had standardized couplings, you could just buy the server, slap it in the rack, and plug the rack hoses into the server. Even better is that once you've got the heat contained in the water, just plug the rack into the centralized (and external to the server room) heat exchanger (via another standardized coupling) and start saving a bundle on a/c costs. Unfortunately I think you'd still need to worry about a bunch of small pumps everywhere, though. One big one to circula
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Well, it was funny for a short while, anyway.
I like this better... (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, real innovative HP. *yawn*
Not Jet engines (Score:2)
It just means they put a fan inside a tube, rather than have a propeller outside.
It's a cosmetic thing to keep the appearance of a jet.
Other than the fan being in a aerodynamic tube, it really isn't any different.
Model Jet Airplanes? Bah. (Score:1)
That would've been entertaining.
You might want to reinforce the footings for those racks before you.. *WHINE* *ROAR* *CRASH*
--
silas
Re:Model Jet Airplanes? Bah. (Score:1)
How long before we bring back chillers? (Score:2)
Powermac (Score:2)
They use Delco pumps and radiators in each CPU module.
Re:How long before we bring back chillers? (Score:1)
Wait for it (Score:1)
2) Tech restarts all his servers.
3) Tech shits himself as all servers simultainiously (sic) take flight smash though the wall and put themselves into a flight path heading fot the North Pole.
Re:Wait for it (Score:2)
5. ???
6. How about a nice game of chess?
Re:Wait for it (Score:1)
Re:Just stop using Java and Oracle. (Score:1)
Re:Just stop using Java and Oracle. (Score:1)
Beaten by Apple (Score:1)
Re:other options (Score:1)
Too late (Score:1)
Re:Too late (Score:1)
Melted plastic and metal everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Little clue: Jet exhaust is... well, let's just call it "a little warm for cooling a server" and leave it at that. The article title gave me this picture of a Rolls jet engine (http://www.rolls-royce.com/education/schools/how
Oh the humanity!
Re:Melted plastic and metal everywhere (Score:2)
PHB: "Why is the system down"
Tech2: "Well, we forgot to power down the cooling system before Tech1 went in to service the system and it sprayed him all over the outside of the building"
PHB: "OK, whatever, I guess you got a promotion. Can you get the thing back up ASAP? Oh, and hire another
Re:Melted plastic and metal everywhere (Score:2)
Same here, though at least I had the sense to assume it would be blowing in an exhaust direction, using the atmosphere to keep the data center full.
My machine is coloed in a building with thousands of other servers, at some scale it must make sense, especially if y
Re:Melted plastic and metal everywhere (Score:2)
Turbo prop jet engines that use atmospheric air to cool the turbine can have exhausts below ambient if designed for the task (the air compresses at the beginning of the engine, radiates heat into the bypass down to something approaching ambient, then both air flows ex
Think about it (Score:2)
leaf blower? (Score:1)
"They literally blow you away," he says; "it's like picking up a leaf blower."
Great. As if I don't get enough of that sound when I'm trying to sleep in on weekends...
Jet Engines! (Score:1)
Drat (Score:3, Interesting)
[insert rant about misleading summary]
I blame marketing (Score:2)
Energy Waste (Score:2)
The net effect is we take a bunch of energy (as electricity) and lose a lot of it as heat then take a bunch more of it (again, electricity) to just move the other "lost" energy (heat) around. It just seems wasteful and expensive to me. T
Re:Energy Waste (Score:2)
Re:Energy Waste (Score:2)
At any rate, yes, I read the article. Perhaps you didn't. There was no mention of anything whatsoever about recovering the energy from the heat transfer. Only mention of more efficient fans, water cooling, peltiers, etc. All things that amount to the same thing: using electricity to generate heat then using even more elect
Re:Energy Waste (Score:2)
Where I live it's only hot for a few months of the year, so most of the time the waste heat from my own computers is used to keep *me* warm.
It does seem like it would make sense to be able to funnel the exhaust from the server rooms into the building HVAC systems somehow. Or team up with a greenhouse next door, or something.
Re:Energy Waste (Score:2)
Re:Energy Waste (Score:2)
You could put a bunch of thermocouples, or rig up lengths of heatpipe to pipe several servers worth of heat into a single location. Do you realize the cost of this?
Keep in mind that low-level heat (anything under a few hundred degrees) isn't enough to generate enough useful energy to make this worthwhile. Perhaps if we can find some other way of power generation..however..
We could use the heat to maybe put some heat back into the HVAC system of a building in the wintertime..might sav
Re:Energy Waste (Score:2)
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about, at least initially. I realize it isn't done now because it's more expensive than just paying for more electricity to, for all intents and purposes, blow the heat away. But piping the hot air into the heating ducts in the winter is a good start. As for water cooled systems, do they have to be closed loop? Why couldn't water co
Why not? (Score:2)
A way to use a real jet engine (Score:4, Funny)
Take one jet engine,
Add stages to capture the thrust and transform it into more torque,
Connect output shaft to massive freakin' compressor turbine,
Use turbine to compress gaseous coolant back to a liquid,
Attach big large radiator/heat exchanger/water cooling tower
Viola! you now have many tonnes of refrigeration capacity, good for blowing cold air through your equipment room, or circulating liquid coolant directly to the chips.
The best part is, you get to have a jet engine tacked on to your server farm.
Doesn't make sense. (Score:1)
The article's sidebar is rather revealing (Score:2)
Those editors sure have an interesting profile of their target readers!
CHP (Score:1)