This is not the first time I'm talking here about cooling technologies. (Check "Computer Makers Feeling the Heat -- Literally" or "Hitachi Introduces a Water-Cooled Laptop (No Kidding!)" for example.)
Lee Bruno just wrote a good article about this issue. The subtitle is: "If you think laptops run hot now, just wait ten years. Unless new technologies cool things down, you'll be able to cook on them." Here is a description of the problem.
The 55 million transistors packed on an average Pentium chip (about the size of a fingernail) switch on and off at such a rapid rate that they generate too much heat for their own good. A typical laptop with a Pentium 4 processor gets hot enough to burn human skin (or at least discourage users from working in shorts). By the end of the decade, it is estimated that a square centimeter of microprocessors (a bit smaller than a postage stamp) will produce an amount of heat equivalent to the space shuttle's rocket exhaust -- roughly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Ouch!
What can we do about this? Let's look at a system developed by a small company, Isothermal Systems Research (ISR).
ISR's system uses a series of nozzles to spray a fine mist of fluid onto the microprocessor and its surrounding components. The resulting vapor is captured by an exchanger that dissipates the heat into the air and condenses the vapor back to a liquid. A miniature pump then recirculates the liquid. (HP is employing its patented inkjet nozzles in a similar spray-cooling technology.) ISR's technology has demonstrated the ability to cool 300 watts per square centimeter, which is roughly ten times more efficient than the forced-air cooling system that chills Intel's latest Itanium chip.
Liquid cooling is certainly effective, but carries a high cost, at least for your ordinary computer. And what about the huge data centers?
If, by the end of the decade, a tiny group of microprocessors will produce the exhaust heat of a rocket, imagine several billion microprocessors humming along in a data center that covers a city block. Chandrakant Patel, principal scientist in the Internet systems and storage lab at HP, and his colleagues estimate that in five years it will cost $4 million a year to cool an average data center, up from roughly $1 million today. Companies spend about 10 percent of their entire power budget just on cooling data centers.
To combat this cost, HP has been developing technology around what it calls "utility computing." In this approach, computing power operates like electricity: processing power, storage, and memory are pulled from wherever it is available: if it is hot in one place, say, Arizona, the network moves its numbers-crunching to a cooler place, say, Alaska. Mr. Patel says such smart cooling could reduce electricity costs by 25 percent.
This is an interesting approach, but true utility computing is years away.
Source: Lee Bruno, Red Herring, February 12, 2003
12:25:40 PM Permalink
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