INDUSTRY

Immersion cooled data center technology enables supercomputer applications to drastically save electricity and reduce water consumption.

Allied Control has won the prestigious Green Innovations Award. The head of the Hong Kong government recognized Allied Control for innovation in finding environmentally friendly industry solutions. Allied Control was recently acquired by the leading Bitcoin infrastructure provider and Blockchain transaction processing company BitFury Group.

“Our proprietary technology is highly energy efficient. We are committed to growing our transaction processing infrastructure with the smallest carbon footprint, continuing to rely solely on renewable energy sources.”

The company has developed its third generation immersion cooling system utilizing 3M Novec Engineered Fluids to create energy-saving data center cooling systems for supercomputing applications. With a PUE of less than 1.01, more than 99% of electricity used for cooling can be saved even in hot and humid Asia, while barely wasting any precious water.

Data centers usually require not only a lot of electricity, but consume a lot of water using evaporative cooling towers and water chillers. For example, it has been reported that the U.S. National Security Agency's massive data center in Bluffdale, Utah, the second driest state in the country, consumes up to 6.6 million gallons of water a month.

In addition to onsite cooling water, data centers also indirectly consume an enormous amount of water embedded in electricity generation which, even excluding hydroelectricity, is estimated to consume 1.8 liters of water per kilowatt-hour (L/kWh) electricity in the U.S.

Although some of the largest data center operators have begun to slash their onsite cooling water usage, the overall water footprint (including both onsite and offsite water) is still one of the important aspects of cloud computing from the perspective of sustainability.

In California, some companies have moved their data centers out of state, to colder climates.

However, the key reason why many US companies and international internet giants like Alibaba are moving a considerable amount of their cloud data center operations to California, is to utilize the high tech talent pool and already existing infrastructure in and around Silicon Valley.

Kar-Wing Lau, VP of Operations at Allied Control commented: “With California being in its fourth consecutive drought year and regulators proposing mandatory reduction of up to 35% in urban water consumption, Allied Control's immersion cooling technology might offer an effective solution to cool down the many data centers serving the hungry and ever-growing demand of cloud services and other Silicon Valley applications. In our standard configuration, the closed loop cooling units do not use evaporative water towers, and as a result, the water usage effectiveness is close to zero (WUE <0.003 L/kWh).”

“We take environmental concerns seriously,” commented BitFury CEO Valery Vavilov. “Our proprietary technology is highly energy efficient. We are committed to growing our transaction processing infrastructure with the smallest carbon footprint, continuing to rely solely on renewable energy sources.”

In a two-phase immersion cooled system, electronic components are submerged into a bath of dielectric heat transfer liquids, which are much better heat conductors than air, water or oil. It is this simplicity that eliminates conventional cooling hardware and results in better cooling efficiency. Compared to traditional air, water or oil cooling, this passive process results in the use of much less energy and lower water consumption. Two-phase immersion cooling is up to 4000 times more efficient at removing heat from chips than air.