And this problem has been there since Day 1 ( For well over a decade ). And no one seems to have solve it. It make sense if you treat the whole Rack as a single entity with water cooling. But for individual server I still dont understand how and why liquid cooling could benefits.
Because liquid cooling is only a marginal benefit for current hardware, hardware designed to be air cooled. If liquid cooling becomes a norm we should start seeing hardware designed with the expectation of liquid cooling. That could mean greater component density and greater power concentration --> greater speeds. One wonders what CPUs would be like if they were designed with the expectation of liquid cooling, water within a millimetre from the heat source rather than the metal heat spreaders that currently top most chips.
How many fans are in a modern server rack? Liquid cooling could theoretically replace all of those with one moving part, one pump impeller.
Or maybe more than one impeller, because at least with the fans, cooling continues if there's a failure in one of them.
I would like to have a quiet and powerful machine for deep learning. The best one I found come from NVIDIA DGX station. It uses liquid cooling and is <35dB acoustics. The problem is that it is too expensive and, last I check, I think it requires buying support contract from third-party.
If liquid cooling is what it takes to have a quiet powerful machine, I hope it will be mainstream.
Source: https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/Data-Cent...
Shove in a https://www.teradici.com/ card, and bam, low latency, high colour accuracy, high resolution remote video.
This allowed us to use the huge machines that drove realtime VFX (your flames, baselite and editing rigs) in utter silence.
But unless you need 4 GPUs, even just 2 GPUs with normal modern air cooling would still be reasonably quiet.
For the overwhelming majority of consumer-oriented products, you don't need water cooling to be silent (or near-silent). Those tower coolers and triple-slot GPU coolers are really good at getting rid of the heat in a noise-efficient manner.
Plus I suspect that having watercooling for that machine allows it to fit in a much smaller space. We had a machine that contained 4 RTX 2080s (or maybe the generation before) and it took up a huge amount of space, and never went at full speed, because of the cooling (those consumer cards are not designed for density.)
I mean yeah, but I doubt its going to be mainstream anytime soon.
At the moment its cheaper to just use forced air, and yolo it. Running at half density is expensive, but not as expensive as backfilling everything with liquid cooling.
Also given that we've been able to run 2 socket blades at full bore without liquid cooling kinda suggests its not actually needed.
Having radiators on the front/back of the rack directly works really well. We had it on our render farm. combine that with enforced hot isle/cold isle and you can reduce the need for aircon dramatically, without multiplying your leak risk by at least 96 times.
The massive problem here is that its really difficult to hotswap anything. Those cooling pipes need to be removed before you can pull out the server. Unless they are self sealing (like hydrolic lines) then you need to drain the loop first. That costs a shitload of money at scale.