On 11/15/13 03:57, Eugen Leitl wrote: > (go visit the site for pretty pikchers) > > http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/11/13/3m-immersion-cooling/
Cool stuff, as immersion cooling always is. However, this got me thinking in the complete opposite direction... Obviously there are cases where you need absurd density for latency critical applications or, I suppose, if the cost of the land in which you needed the computing to be local too was very costly. Or, as they show, maybe you just want the efficiency of cooling to be near to perfect. However, (here begins a very possibly insane set of ideas) what if instead of reaching for low density and really efficient cooling, you went the other way and spread things out and tried not to actively chill air at all? Sure, your network latency will shoot up, but for many applications (data centers in particular) this may not matter at all. As a broken example, in the fall, my windows are open here in PA, I have no "chillers" in my house, and my server/desktop/microcluster runs just fine. This is clearly a straw man example, as I have far too few machines for this to be reasonable. But my core question here stands: Are there places in the world so arid and stable in temperature that you could effectively run a data center or compute farm outside (or "almost outside") and just let some big fans move the heat away from the cluster (maybe with just a pavilion-style roof on it)? Maybe even someplace that has reasonably stable temperatures that you could just slightly condition the air for humidity before pushing it through? I know condensation is a problem if you were someplace too cold or too humid, but I'm not sure what the relative sensitivity for that is. Just throwing this out there -- the people who actually know things about material science on this list should feel free to laugh and explain to me why this could never work. Just a beer-infused Friday-night idea. Best, ellis _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
