IBM Tests IDC Heating Homes

• By Justin Lee, November 21, 2008

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November 21, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory (www.zurich.ibm.com) has announced details about a new project that will reduce its data centers' energy consumption by 50 percent through an innovative process that cools computers with water and reuses the dissipated energy to heat homes in the area, according to reports by IEEE Spectrum Online.

IBM engineers announced at this week's International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, known as SC08, in Austin that they have developed a prototype system for the technique which they expect to launch in five years.

IBM's new liquid cooling technique cools computers using water to heat nearby homes.

According to Bruno Michel, manager of the advanced thermal packaging group at IBM's Zurich laboratory, the company's engineers have constructed a facility that reuses 85 percent of ita generated heat while consuming only half the energy.

The facility is cooled with water pumped through microchannels within the server processors instead of relying on air-conditioning or fans. Absorbing the heat from the data center, the water is then distributed to houses in the area for heating, where occupants will pay for the heat. Michel says that a 10MW data center could generate enough energy to heat 700 homes.

The team initially struggled with determining a water temperature cool enough for the facility to prevent it from overheating while being warm enough that the water being pumped out could still be used to heat homes, says Michel. Finally, it found that an incoming water temperature of around 95 °F would result in an outgoing temperature of 140 °F.

According to Randy Katz, a data center specialist and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, liquid cooling is generally more efficient than traditional air conditioners because you can pinpoint exactly where the hottest areas of the computer and therefore not overcool the room.

But IBM's new system is expected to come with larger upfront costs than an air-conditioned data center, says Michel. He estimates that a new data center would cost 10 percent more, while upgrading a recently built air-cooled facility would cost about 30 percent of its original cost.

However, he says it is a small price to pay when considering that these extra costs will be recouped in one to two years from the significant energy savings.

Earlier this week, The WHIR reported on a relatively new data center cooling technique called the "heat wheel," which is also referred to as a rotary heat exchanger or Kyoto Cooling. The method combines a data center's outside and exhaust air to facilitate an "air-to-air" heat exchange.

Also this week, the Red Rocks Data Center announced that it installed the Trane Voyager air economizer system, a coventional air conditioning system, which has cut its cooling costs to one-sixth of its previous consumption.

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