there are six 10 000 computers completely
submerged in here like no really this
entire rack is filled with a solution that cools better than water dissolves
in water and it's absolutely 100
safe but how can fellow canadians hypertech get away with dunking in this
very expensive gear like their luke aka
slick pc i'll tell you how
right after i tell you about our sponsor MSI MSI's back-to-school sale is on now
where you can save on laptops desktops and components there's also a giveaway
to win some sweet prizes learn more at the link below or at the end of this
video
anyone who's been a fan of the channel will know that we've built several total
immersion mineral oil pcs so like what's new here
well this isn't mineral oil nor is it some
flammable alternative this tank which is a show tank that's about half the actual
length is filled with a dielectric or non-conductive mixture that's
significantly lighter than most popular alternatives while also being better at
conducting heat given that's pretty much its only
purpose any improvement there is obviously welcome to add insult to
injury the mixture is also a lot better for the environment it breaks down
safely in water mineral oil by comparison is a petroleum byproduct with
a laxative effect at best and is a carcinogen at worst i'm told that this
mix is straight up safe to drink not that i really wanted to try it after
being on the showroom floor for three days but i did end up getting some
splashed into my mouth so i can tell you that it doesn't taste great that was
warm also i tasted some i'm assured that it's not 3m's novak 649 as well
that stuff likes to boil and is dangerous to inhale they wouldn't tell
me what this stuff is exactly but it's
also not a hydrofluoroethane like novak 7000 either
your guess is as good as mine oh and they're making the chassis out of ocean
recycled plastics by end of year as well at least that's what they hope to do but
let's back up a sec server racks in data centers are already
cooled by high-end air coolers and even liquid coolers so why are we even
talking about this well there's a few reasons first and
foremost this rack has zero fans and is basically silent by
comparison it works by pumping the coolant through a loop to an exterior
box that looks a bit like an hvac unit that box exchanges the thermal energy
from the hot mixture to a cold water source in a single phase arrangement
that means practically all of the noise it does make so the pump basically ends
up well outside of the room because the installation doesn't require
raised floors or bulky chiller units inside the data center it's relatively
easy to retrofit into existing architecture what's more because all the
heat is exchanged well outside of the rack the rack itself needs no hvac to
cool it something we've struggled with in our own relatively tiny server room
that means significant power savings because not only does hvac that's beefy
enough to cool an entire server room or data center require a massive amount of
juice so too to the high performance fans that you hear screaming inside of those racks
hypertech claims a 30 to 40 percent reduction in cooling costs compared to
hvac alone along with a 60 percent better hardware lifespan and to achieve
that they painstakingly remove all of the fans from the hardware inside of the
systems and replace their RPM sensors with sensors to monitor the temperature
of the cooling solution as well as updating the BIOS to understand that
this results in far less moving parts which are typically the most likely to
fail all while retaining the original warranty thanks to their partnerships
with hardware vendors like our good friends at NVIDIA
speaking of NVIDIA they're part of the reason why hypertech is here to begin
with with this immersion rack rumor has it that the upcoming newer
generations of gpus and cpus alike are going to be designed to draw more and
more power meaning that traditional cooling solutions will struggle to keep
up without more exotic cooling solutions like hypertexts hypertech says that
their solution can handle basically any load they can foresee up to nearly a
hundred kilowatts and they can tailor the installation to meet the demand if
for some insane reason that's not enough to dissipate all the heat your rack's
blasting out or i guess soaking out
now in a traditional data center the systems inside it generate a boatload of
waste heat like effectively 100 of the electrical energy a computer consumes
ends up converted to thermal energy or heat
then we had to use even more electricity
to get rid of said thermal energy which we call cooling now we've already told
you how this takes the cooling electricity draw out of the equation but
what if i told you that the heat electricity draw which there's no way
around we need that for computers to work could be used for something else
hypertech claims that 99 of the heat generated inside the loop can be
captured as water they already have deployments that dump
the heat into a building's hot water loops and in-floor radiant heating to
either provide extra thermal capacity to those systems or even power them
outright that works out to a significant energy
savings because not only do you then not have to deal with hvac you're also not
footing as big a bill for water boilers especially
otherwise you'd have to upgrade a loop as your knees expand
one thing you might be wondering at this point is
aren't those ports submerged too and yeah i was wondering the same thing
when we built our mineral oil pc we let the i o ports on the motherboard and GPU
exposed but here all hardware maintenance is done with a dielectric
mix already in the tank and that includes plugging and unplugging
connectors i'm told that the mixture is thin enough that electrical connections can be made
reliably although fiber optic cables need to be plugged into their sfp
transceivers first because of how sensitive they are a thin film of
dielectric is enough to prevent reliable transmission if you were to just shove
it in there and speaking of shoving things in there like while you don't
have to worry about dust build up as you do on traditional air cooling you're
meant to work directly inside the dielectric so that means oils bacteria
and yes dust particles will collect inside the loop from time to time
that's where the loop itself comes in because the coolant is constantly
cycling they can filter it later down the chain in the easy to access panel
that makes cleaning much easier than a traditional rack where you'd have to
dust them individually from time to time they told me you could theoretically
drop a coffee in there and it'd be okay thanks to that filtration although i'm
sure they wouldn't recommend trying it if you can help it
under normal conditions they expect that the coolant will last for about 15 years
this compared to the two phase coolers that are available now that use evaporation that need topping up every
two years because they're actually losing the coolant and when the time
comes for the solution to be recycled the solution can actually be
reconstituted with a simple dialysis you don't even need to drain it and
replace it on the show floor here they're trying to attract media companies with render
farms that need massive GPU horsepower a full-size tank of one of these can
contain 144 xeon render blades with gpus and
with the stuff that NVIDIA has been showing off with photogrammetry and ai
digital twin simulations it's becoming ever more important for some even
smaller outfits that have access to that kind of compute if the TDP rumors are
true of NVIDIA's upcoming rtx 40 series aka 8 and lovelace then achieving that
will come at a significant cost to upgrade existing server racks and that's
to say nothing of the environmental impact traditional setups will have not
just running but cooling all of that extra hardware
it's unorthodox but it might just be a
crazy like a fox kind of situation that makes more sense the more you think
about it maybe i can convince Linus to submerge our server room so we don't
have to stop filming every time the door opens and maybe i can convince you to hear
about our sponsor MSI MSI's back-to-school sale is on now
looking for a new laptop for next semester they got those or what about a
desktop pc that is totally for school and not for gaming mom i swear
well you're covered there too and if you're into building your own pc they
even have components on sale MSI is also
doing a gleam giveaway where you can win sweet prizes like a full-blown gaming
desktop or a MSI GeForce rtx 3080ti
gaming x trio graphics card you can find out more about MSI's back to school sale
and how you can win these prizes in the link below thanks for watching guys we
don't typically cover siggraph but this year we felt we almost had to for more
server room shenanigans go check out our end game storage solution of 270 hard
drives oh right i guess that means that it can't be
submerged oh well