Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Thursday 2/2/2006

Talking of breathing, like most animals I create quite a lot of carbon dioxide. This is a handy gas, used by plants to fuel photosynthesis and more importantly by yeast to power beer and champagne. I'm not entirely sure how it finds its way into tonic water, but I'm glad that it does.

But now it has a new role, helping to keep server rooms cool despite the best efforts of Intel and AMD to heat them up. It's got a much higher specific heat capacity than water, is cheap, isn't particularly toxic and doesn't smell — all of which give it something of an advantage over most server room denizens.

I can't get that excited about it, however, as it's only a way to dump heat more efficiently. It doesn't take much environmental awareness to feel like a dork standing in a ferociously air-conditioned server room in the middle of winter, while all around you offices are being kept toasty warm by oil-fired boilers. In fact, this may be a good argument to break out the blades from their cabinets and mount them on the walls around the offices in natty white radiator cases. With enough bandwidth and some proper grid-type load sharing, offices worldwide can collaborate in offloading the bulk of their computing requirements to whichever city is the coldest.

It's also possible that we're going the wrong way in trying to make all our equipment use less power by spreading out the processing requirements between cores, blades, cabinets and clusters. Thermodynamics has it that the hotter something runs in relation to its environment the more efficiently the energy can be used – which is why they spend so much time with liquid metal cooled nuclear reactors, after all. So instead of creating loads and loads of silicon cores running at a few GHz and a meagre 100°C, we need a few absolutely incandescent devices throbbing away at terahertz and spewing out kilowatts of useful, turbine-driving hot hot heat. Silicon carbide might be a good starting material. Then we can turn the waste back into electricity – and make server rooms far more exciting places to work.

Mind you, the laptop version will be entertaining.