- There are six (attendants chattering)
$10,000 computers (register dings)
completely submerged in here. (water burbling)
Like, no, really this entire rack is filled
with a solution (air swooshing)
that cools better than water,
dissolves in water, and it's absolutely 100% safe.
But how can fellow Canadians Hypertec get away
with dunking in this very expensive gear
like their Luke AKA Slick PC?
I'll tell you how, right after I tell you about our sponsor.
MSI!
MSI's Back to School Sale is on now, where you can save
on laptops, desktops, and components.
There's also a giveaway to win some sweet prizes.
Learn more at the link below or at the end of this video.
(upbeat music)
- Anyone who's been a fan (attendants chattering)
of the channel will know
that we've built several total immersion mineral oil PCs.
So like what's new here?
Well, this isn't mineral oil
nor is it some flammable alternative.
This tank, which is a show tank
that's about half the actual length is filled
with a dielectric or non-conductive mixture
that's significantly lighter than most popular alternatives
while also being better at conducting heat.
Given that's pretty much it's only purpose,
any improvement there is obviously welcome.
To add insult injury,
the mixture is also a lot better for the environment.
It breaks down safely in water.
Mineral oil by comparison is a petroleum byproduct
with a laxative effect at best and is a carcinogen at worst.
I'm told that this mix is straight up safe to drink.
Not that I really wanted to try it
after being on the showroom floor for three days
but it did end up getting something splashed
into my mouth so I can tell you that it doesn't taste great.
That was warm, also, I tasted some.
I'm assured that it's not 3M's Novac 649 as well.
That stuff likes to boil and is dangerous to inhale.
They wouldn't tell me what this stuff is exactly,
but it's also not a hydrofluoroethane
like Novec 7000 either.
Your guess is as good as mine.
Oh, and they're making the chassis out
of ocean recycled plastics by end of year, as well,
at least that's what they hope to do,
but let's back up a sec.
Server racks in data centers are already cooled
by high end air coolers and even liquid coolers.
So why are we even talking about this?
Well, there's a few reasons.
First and foremost, this rack has zero fans
and is basically silent by comparison.
It works by pumping the coolant
through a loop to an exterior box
that looks a bit like an HVAC unit.
That box exchanges the thermal energy from the hot mixture
to a cold water source in a single phase arrangement.
That means practically all of the noise it does make,
some pump basically, ends up well outside of the room.
Because the installation doesn't require raised floors
or a bulky chiller units inside the data center,
it's relatively easy to retrofit into existing architecture.
What's more, because all the heat is exchanged well
outside of the rack,
the rack itself needs no HVAC to cool it.
Something we've struggled with
in our own relatively tiny server room.
That means significant power savings,
because not only does HVAC, that's beefy enough
to cool the entire server room
or data center require a massive amount of juice,
so too do the high performance fans
that you hear screaming inside of those racks.
Hypertec claims a 30 to 40% reduction
in cooling costs compared to HVAC alone,
along with a 60% better hardware lifespan
and to achieve that, they painstakingly removed all
of the fans from the hardware inside of the systems
and replace their RPM sensors with sensors
to monitor the temperature of the cooling solution
as well as updating the BIOS to understand that.
This results in far less moving parts,
which are typically the most likely to fail,
all while retaining the original warranty
thanks to their partnerships with hardware vendors
like our good friends at Nvidia.
Speaking of Nvidia, they're part
of the reason why Hypertec is here to begin with
with this immersion rack.
Rumor has it that the upcoming newer generations
of GPUs and CPUs alike are gonna be designed
to draw more and more power.
Meaning that traditional cooling solutions will struggle
to keep up without more exotic cooling solutions
like Hypertec's.
Hypertec says that their solution can handle basically
any load they can foresee, up to nearly a hundred kilowatts,
and they can tailor the installation to meet the demand
if for some insane reason, that's not enough
to dissipate all of the heat your rack's blasting out
or I guess sucking out.
Now, in a traditional data center,
the systems inside it generate a boatload
of waste heat, like effectively, a hundred percent
of the electrical energy a computer consumes ends
up converted to thermal energy or heat.
Then we had to use even more electricity
to get rid of said thermal energy, which we call cooling.
Now, we've already told you how this takes
the cooling electricity draw outta the equation,
but what if I told you that the heat electricity draw,
which there's no way around, we need
that for computers to work could be used for something else?
Hypertec claims that 99% of the heat generated
inside the loop can be captured as water.
They already have deployments that dump the heat
into a building's hot water loops
and inflow radiant heating
to either provide extra thermal capacity
to those systems or even power them outright.
That works out to a significant energy savings
because not only do you then not have to deal with HVAC,
you're also not footing as big a bill for water boilers,
especially if otherwise you'd have to upgrade a loop
as you need to expand.
One thing you might be wondering
at this point is, aren't those ports submerged too?
And yeah, I was wondering the same thing.
When we built our mineral oil PC,
we let the IO ports on the motherboard and GPU exposed
but here all hardware maintenance is done
with the dielectric mix already in the tank,
and that includes plugging and unplugging connectors.
I'm told that the mixture is thin enough
that electrical connections can be made reliably,
although fiber optic cables need to be plugged
into their SFP transceivers first,
because of how sensitive they are.
A thin film of dielectric is enough
to prevent reliable transmission
if you were to just shove it in there.
And speaking of shoving things in there,
like, while you don't have to worry about dust buildup
as you do on traditional air cooling,
you're meant to work directly inside the dielectric.
So that means oils, bacteria,
and yes, dust particles will collect
inside the loop from time to time.
That's where the loop itself comes in.
Because the coolant is constantly cycling,
they can filter it later down the chain
in the easy to access panel that makes cleaning much easier
than a traditional rack where you'd have
to dust them individually from time to time.
They told me that you could theoretically drop a coffee
in there and it'd be okay, thanks to that filtration,
although I'm sure they wouldn't recommend trying it
if you can help it.
Under normal conditions,
they expect that the coolant will last for about 15 years
as compared to the two phase coolers
that are available now
that use evaporation that need topping up every two years
because they're actually losing the coolant.
And when the time comes for the solution to be recycled
the solution can actually be reconstituted
with a simple dialysis.
You don't even need to drain it and replace it.
On the show floor here,
they're trying to attract media companies
with render firms that need massive GPU horsepower.
A full size tank of one
of these can contain 144 Xeon Render Blades with GPUs
and with the stuff that Nvidia has been showing off
with photogrammetry and AI digital twin simulations,
it's becoming ever more important
for the even smaller outfits that have access
to that kind of compute.
If the TDP rumors are true
of Nvidia's upcoming RTX 40 series,
AKA Ada Lovelace, then achieving that will come
at a significant cost to upgrade existing server racks.
And that's to say nothing
of the environmental impact traditional setups will have,
not just running, but cooling all of that extra hardware.
It's unorthodox,
but it might just be a crazy like a fox kind of situation
that makes more sense the more you think about it.
Maybe I can convince Linus to submerge our server room
so we don't have to stop filming every time the door opens.
And maybe I can convince you to hear about our sponsor.
MSI!
MSI's Back to School Sale is on now.
Looking for a new laptop for next semester?
They got those,
or what about a desktop PC that is totally
for school and not for gaming, mom, I swear?
Well, you're covered there too.
And if you're into building your own PC,
they even have components on sale.
MSI is also doing a Gleam giveaway
where you can win sweet prizes,
like a full blown gaming desktop
or an MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Gaming X Trio graphics card.
You can find out more about MSI's Back to School Sale
and how you can win these prizes in the link below.
- Thanks for watching guys! (upbeat music)
We don't typically cover SIGGRAPH
but this year we felt we almost had to.
For more server room shenanigans, go check
out our end game storage solution of 270 hard drives.
Oh, right!
I guess that means that it can't be submerged.
Oh, well.