So far the
conclusions are that watercooling is not really practical outside of
experimental systems (such as the K supercomputer), air cooling tends to have
high running costs, and oil is a mess.
My design,
inspired by heatpipe coolers aims to dissipate heat using standard heatpipes from
chips to chassis, and then dissipate the chassis heat using a cold wall on both
sides of the rack. The cold wall is actually just a rack-wall sized waterblock
with bottom connectors for leak protection.
The result
is passive cooling at chassis level (with the exception of light airflow to
keep the rest of the board cool), and extremely cheap standard scale
watercooling.
The hot
water from the rack gets cooled by another cold wall which swims in an
artificial river located just below the compute floor, with a slight slope and
a single set of redundant pumps to keep the river flowing.
It may be
possible to further improve the efficiency by using huge heatpipes instead of
cold walls, but then that would position the “artificial river” above the
racks…
So far,
I’ve gotten my hands on some very nice heatpipes, but haven’t begun testing the
cold wall part.
