Liquid cooling is cool.... (Score 2, Informative)

many good reasons to use liquid cooling. firstly, it's *very* efficient and it allows very high volumetric density. secondly, there are times when air cooling is a Truly Bad Idea, like on boats, ships, and submarines, but also even "ground-based" transportation applications. It's pretty clear that blowing salt air over a circuit board (even with conformal coating) is a Bad Idea(tm), but it's also true in cars, trucks (aka "lorries"), and things like earthmovers. and in large systems, the efficiency part is a Really Big Deal. Heating up a huge flow of air on its way to the ceiling, just so the air chiller can try to move it back down to get sucked in again is just stupid except at very small scale. the Beowulf cluster in question may not *demand* liquid cooling, but you don't have to build one a lot larger for the difference to matter a lot. (This is especially true in Europe where rooms are not airconditioned to the degree they are in the US in the first place.) rather than upgrade an entire AC system, which probably involves lots of work on a 500 year old building, just run the loop to a remote chiller and declare victory. as for "it will leak", note that almost everything electronic in a submarine is liquid-cooled. it is true that the primary loop through the cold plate may not be water, but it gets to a water loop pretty quickly. no-leak connectors have been around a very long time - just not cheap ones. a large demand for better cooling technology is important to drive down the costs and to make it commonplace and not just the province of "Big Iron" (supercomputers or otherwise). -mo