Reports and Studies

Tom Lawler Tom Lawler

Risk Assessment Model

Liquid Cooling Coalition

The Liquid Cooling Coalition has released a free, in-depth tool assessing the top 200 risks in liquid cooling for data center electronics.

Originally introduced at Yotta 2024for peer review and feedback, this ISO 31000 series risk assessment model assesses the top 200 risks in liquid cooling of electronics in data centers. The Liquid Cooling Coalition is offering this model as a free resource without limitation or licensing.  The Liquid Cooling Coalition encourages your feedback on this model as the authors will continue to update and refine this model based on feedback and publish updates quarterly at this location.

Download the model here.

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Molly Igoe Molly Igoe

Promise and Peril: Sustainability & the Rise of Artificial Intelligence

Digital Climate Alliance

This paper explores the promise of AI in advancing climate and sustainability solutions across the economy (i.e., its “handprint”), the potential peril of its environmental impacts (i.e., its “footprint”), and offers strategic policy recommendations to maximize AI’s sustainability benefits while mitigating its environmental footprint.

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Molly Igoe Molly Igoe

How Direct Liquid Cooling Improves Data Center Efficiency

Cool IT Systems

Data centers are experiencing increasing power consumption, space constraints and cooling demands due to the unprecedented computing power required by today’s chips and servers. HVAC cooling systems consume approximately 40% of a data center’s electricity. These systems traditionally use air conditioning, air handling and fans to cool the data center facility and IT equipment, ultimately resulting in high energy consumption and high carbon emissions. Data centers are moving to direct liquid cooled (DLC) systems to improve cooling efficiency thus lowering their PUE, operating expenses (OPEX) and carbon footprint.

This paper describes how CoolIT Systems (CoolIT) meets the need for improved energy efficiency in data centers and includes case studies that show how CoolIT’s DLC solutions improve energy efficiency, increase rack density, lower OPEX, and enable sustainability programs. CoolIT is the global market and innovation leader in scalable DLC solutions for the world’s most demanding computing environments. CoolIT’s end-to-end solutions meet the rising demand in cooling and the rising demand for energy efficiency.

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Molly Igoe Molly Igoe

Five Data Center Predictions For 2024

Uptime Intelligence

In this report, Uptime Intelligence looks beyond the more obvious trends of 2024 and identifies and examines some of the latest developments and their associated limitations. Strong demand for IT and increasingly high-density IT systems, along with the need to meet tough sustainability requirements, will drive a new wave of investment. Operators will be forced to respond to issues around scale and complexity, as well as innovations in cooling, software and power, while engineering will be pushed to new limits.

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Molly Igoe Molly Igoe

Data Center Frontier Special Report: Liquid cooling is in your future

Data Center Frontier

This report explains why liquid cooling is the future of the data center. First, the report explains why liquid cooling is so important and how it will increase flexibility and capabilities. Then, the author outlines the three primary types of liquid cooling –liquid-to-air, liquid-to-liquid, and direct immersion. Finally, the report provides tips for how to deploy liquid cooling solutions, how to evaluate an environment for the move to liquid cooling, and why it’s important to build for the future.

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Molly Igoe Molly Igoe

Liquid Cooling Solutions From Super Micro

Super Micro

This white paper provides an overview of the advantages of liquid cooling, different types of liquid cooling, and showcases Supermicro’s systems with liquid cooling.

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Innovative Cooling Pushes the Boundaries of HPC Density without Sacrificing Efficiency

atNORTH

Demands on data centers is intensifying as the need for computing continues to grow. As computing becomes more powerful, components within the data centers start to generate more heat, which can lead to decreased performance and even hardware failure, as well as sustainability and efficiency challenges. For high-performance computing systems, cooling is a core consideration.

It is becoming ever more critical to build sustainable data center operations with energy-efficient cooling, as the power consumption continues to increase, along with the associated heat produced. atNorths SWE01 data center facility in Stockholm, Sweden was specifically designed for high density workloads, such as advanced calculations for AI, simulations, and risk analysis. It has also been architected, designed, and built from the ground up to ensure sustainable operations across the whole of the site, where the selection of the rig cooling system was a key component of the design process.

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Molly Igoe Molly Igoe

Guidelines for Connecting Liquid Cooling Technology to Data Centers

Open Compute Project

The purpose of this paper is to develop standardized practices in connection of vendor-based ACS solutions to Facility Water Systems (FWS) and/or Condenser Water Systems (CWS) with the objective of maximizing scalability, efficiency, reliability at lower cost and minimal operational impact.

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Liquid Cooling Integration and Logistics White Paper

Open Compute Project

This document focuses on Technology Cooling System (TCS) liquid cooling infrastructure integration and logistics for the data center. The authors provide general guidance on server manufacturing levels, transportation, guidance on system integration and commissioning best practices. The document also provides steps required for data center installation and commissioning to provision liquid cooled racks ready for operation

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Molly Igoe Molly Igoe

Direct Liquid Cooling: CAPEX And OPEX, The Complete ROI Story

Cool IT Systems and STULZ USA

High Performance Computing (HPC) cooling technologies are moving into the enterprise sector. Data centers face major costs for cooling based on running increased workloads and thermal requirements. Data centers have traditionally used chillers, evaporative cooling towers, pumps, Computer Room Air Conditioner (CRAC) units and Computer Room Air Handling (CRAH) units to cool their infrastructure. Data centers are starting to integrate Direct Liquid Cooled (DLC) solutions to meet stringent energy standards, reduce costs, and increase cooling efficiency. Both traditional air conditioning and DLC are needed to meet data center cooling needs.

Organizations need to consider Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) and Operating Expense (OPEX) to determine when to use air conditioning, a DLC solution, or a hybrid solution in their data center. This paper compares the CAPEX and OPEX costs of using traditional air cooling solutions from STULZ USA with a hybrid solution that uses both STULZ air cooling and CoolIT DLC solutions.

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Molly Igoe Molly Igoe

Emergence and Expansion of Liquid Cooling in Mainstream Data Centers

ASHRAE

Large power increases in the compute, memory, and storage subsystems of current and future IT equipment are already challenging data centers, especially those with short refresh cycles. The challenges will only increase. Liquid cooling is becoming a requirement in some cases, and should be strongly and quickly considered. This paper explains why liquid cooling should be considered, rather than the details around what liquid cooling is or how to deploy it.

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Liquid Cooling Technologies for Data Centers and Edge Applications

Schneider Electric

This white paper covers the fundamentals of liquid cooling, describes the advantages over conventional air cooling, and explains the 5 main direct to chip and immersive methods. To help guide the selection of the appropriate liquid cooling method for a given need, the authors explain the key attributes that must be considered.

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Liquid Cooling Requirements White Paper

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

This paper is a collaborative effort between the U.S. and China to exchange and coordinate data center standards and specifications, give manufacturers clear market signals that promote technology compatibility and cost reductions, and achieve high efficiency, low emission data centers.

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