Investigation of immersion cooling for data center hardware: progress, opportunities and challenges

Presented by Cheng Chen (Meta) | Jayati Athavale (Meta)
Immersion cooling is one of the promising paths potentially for future Data Center Hardware cooling. In the past one and half years, we’ve been examining various options of immersion cooling solutions, and evaluating their feasibility and dependencies to enable at large scales. In this presentation, we will introduce our exploratory efforts across both single phase and two phase immersion options, and observations of trade-offs at engineering level. We will also discuss the foreseeable challenges and opportunities, especially on fluid choices and compatibility evaluation, that would need community effort to embrace together.

[@carlschumacher5510]

The data center I worked in from 2012 - 2021 as a data center engineer / Linux systems admin started out with classic air cooled vertical racks...In 2017 single-phase immersion cooling was added (horizontal 50U vats using a mineral oil type coolant)...The perhaps single downside was the messiness of working on said servers during hardware upgrades or break/fix...Being the person that handled server recycling when a batch (100s to 1000+) of servers aged out, I always wondered how that would be handled for these oil covered servers.