As chip thermal design power consumption (TDP) increases, many businesses or organizations have the cooling needs of high-performance computing (HPC) to support high-power loads. Direct liquid cooling technology has become a widely accepted cooling method in the high-performance computing (HPC) space as a cooling solution for AI servers that focuses on efficiency and reducing operational costs
Direct liquid cooling, also known as direct to chip liquid cooling.Direct liquid cooling can be used in standard racks in data centers. Racks are retrofitted to utilize direct to chip liquid cooling technology without the need to replace a lot of legacy equipment. This method only cools specific components such as CPUs, GPUs, etc.
Direct to chip liquid cooling is indirect liquid cooling, where the coolant does not come into direct contact with the server's heat-generating components (CPU/GPU/DIMM, etc.). The technical principle is that the liquid cooling plate (usually copper and aluminum and other heat-conducting metals or plastics composed of closed cavity) close to the server heating components, the use of cold plate in the closed, circular flow of the medium to take away the heat. The coolant flows through the heat generating components and is brought to the cooling tower for cooling, and the cooled liquid returns to the heat generating components in a closed loop system to complete the cooling loop.
Single-phase Direct Liquid Cooling
Direct liquid cooling can be single-phase or two-phase. So far, Single-phase direct liquid cooling is a more mature technology compared to two-phase and has been deployed in a number of cases in industries such as Internet and communications. CDU, liquid-cooled IT equipment, cold plate, quick disconnects(QDs) are the main components of the direct liquid cooling program, of which the cold plate is the core component of the liquid-cooling system, and the design of the cold plate structure is the key technology for direct to chip cooling.
Single-phase direct liquid cooling technology
Single-phase direct liquid cooling technology has two main cold plate
1. Microchannel cold plate
Liquid coolant is pumped through the cold plate processing of these narrow channels
2. Microconvection cold plate
Used for convection cooling, where small fluid jet arrays within the small cold plate module are used to cool the liquid coolant at very high temperatures.
1.The technology is relatively mature, the ecology is perfect, the transformation of cabinets and servers is small, the initial investment is small, and the cost advantage is obvious.
2.It does not change the customer's usage habits, and the operation and maintenance mode, server room load-bearing and air-cooled scenarios are basically the same.
3. Cooling medium does not directly contact the chip and other parts of the server, low compatibility requirements for materials, can be relatively easy to be compatible with different manufacturers and models of computing equipment, providing more space for hardware selection; high-speed link signal integrity of the server also has no impact.
4. Takes up relatively little space, suitable for data centers and computing environments with space constraints.
5. Less demand for cooling medium, cold plate liquid cooling cooling medium compared to submerged liquid cooling with fluorinated liquid is also more environmentally friendly.
6.The cooling capacity of single chip is more than 1kW, with higher single-point cooling capacity.
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