Cooling the data center
IBM, HP engineers explore ways to make IT more energy efficient
By Scott Ferguson pumping water through to cool the moving to this water cooling idea is not
Ibm and hewlett-packard are chip. The company demonstrated only are you able to remove heat more
putting the muscle of their its chip-stacking technology in 2007, efficiently, but you don’t have to cool air
research labs behind projects which places the chips and memory using air conditioning.”
designed to help enterprises build components on top of one another For HP, thegoalistocreate what HP
data centers that can handle increas- on a silicon wafer instead of side Labs calls sustainable IT technologies
ingly powerful technologies without by side. for the data center. The first part of this
seeing corresponding jumps in power These sandwiched chips—each mea- new sustainability research will focus
consumption. sures about 4 centimeters square and is on reducing the amount of electricity
At a technical conference June 5, about 1 millimeter thick—can dissipate needed to power a data center.
researchers with IBM Labs and the about 1 kilowatt of power. Instead of try- HP researchers aim to cut the total
Fraunhofer Institute in B erlin demon- carbon footprint of the data center by
strated a new system of cooling proces- 75 percent and the cost of running 24-
sors by piping water directly into hour data centers. They also say they
the chips instead of the more can use the result of their labors to
conventional method of using create “smart” facilities that use less
air to remove heat and cool electricity.
a system. The second part of
The demonstra- the research will look at
tion came a day after replacing the copper wires
HP Labs announced an in chips with light pulses, called
agenda to develop a series photonic interconnections, to reduce
of technologies that will reduce heat. It also will allow data to travel
the carbon footprint of data cen- IBM is looking to use water greater distances much faster.
to cool stacks of processors.
ters by 75 percent, replace the copper Finally, HP researchers will work
wiring on microprocessors with light ing to cool the chips with air, researchers to develop software and services that
pulses, and develop new software and decided to pump water into the stack will create metrics to measure a range
services to measure energy use and through pipes that measure about 50 of energy uses within the data center
carbon emissions. microns, which is about the thickness from carbon emissions, total energy
The moves come at a time when of a human hair. use and energy consumption.
power consumption is becoming a key While water might hold the key to HP Labs is looking beyond the
concern at many enterprises. The com- better power efficiency, IBM also made data center and into ways other busi-
binationofsuchissuesastheheatbeing sure to insulate the electrical compo- nesses can benefit from this research.
generated by increasingly smaller and nents from the water that would flow One tool HP scientists plan to use is
more powerful chips, soaring power through the chip, taking the heat with Lifetime Exergy Advisor, software
prices and the jump in costs to build it as it flowed out. that helps measure the amount of
data centers has IT professionals look- Joe Clabby, an analyst with Clabby energy that goes into a product from
ing for more ways to make their facili- Analytics, has done research showing the time that product is created to
ties energy efficient. that water is 23 times more energy when it’s manufactured, shipped,
For IBM, the thrust of its research efficient than air in terms of heat dis- used and then recycled. ´
is to find a better way to remove sipation.
heat at the chip level, which will “Theenterprisecomputingworldhas All in one
also have an effect on the amount got to move to water,” Clabby said. “If With its EDS buy, HP is looking to become
of power used in the data center. IBM you’re building an enterprise data center, a one-stop data center shop, Chris
researchers are drilling tiny holes in you’re going to make it very dense and Preimesberger writes. At eweek.com
a three-dimensional chip stack and ... energy efficient. The reason you are
