Servers bathed in oil
A Porsche-o-phile friend of mine sort of jokes that air-cooled Porsche 911 sports car engines aren’t so much air-cooled as they are cooled by circulating their oil, some 12 or 15 quarts of it. (For a more technical explanation, Google “air-cooled Porsche.”) Porsche enthusiasts still argue about the merits of the company's decision to change from an air-cooled engine to a liquid-cooled engine in the 911.
Will the idea of oil-cooled computers bring about similar debate? We're about to find out as oil cooling may be around the corner for some applications. A United Kingdom-based firm called Very-PC has begun to apply the idea to computer processors, a report on NewScientist.com (link: here) says. The report highlights Very-PC's experiments with oil-cooled servers. Water-cooled processors are popular among gamers, for example, but use a small amount of the liquid in an enclosed system. Very-PC is looking at submerging a computer--or at least some of its parts--in oil as a method of cooling. Oil submersion could allow for the removal of a computer's fans and therefore cut back on its power consumption, the piece says. Indeed, it takes a certain amount of electricity to power the fans which are then used to cool off a server.
Why Oil? Speaking in general terms, the substance is better at removing heat than air and is of course more ideal than using water. Somewhere there's a joke about computers and water and how they don’t really mix. But here's also where the debate could start. As the NewScientist piece also points out, advances in processor technology are likely to help cool down computers all by themselves. After all, creating chips that consume less power and thus produce less heat reduces the need for cooling. Work by Intel and AMD to reduce the amount of electricity consumed by their processors—and thus to help lower the heat given off by servers—is becoming more and more important to the two companies' marketing strategies as time goes by. The question that remains, I think, is will that be enough?