[bri3d]

The parent poster is just either extremely confidently wrong or talking about a very different project from the one in the linked article - here's an article from 2005 with Figure 1 dating from (according to the article) 1965 (!!) showing the same CDU architecture shown in the chipsandcheese article: https://www.electronics-cooling.com/2005/08/liquid-cooling-i...

I do think Google must be doing something right, as their quoted PUE numbers are very strong, but nothing about what's in the linked chipsandcheese article seems groundbreaking at all architecturally, just strong micro-optimization. The article talks a lot about good plate/thermal interface design, good water flow management, use of active flow control valves, and a ton of iteration at scale to find the optimal CDU-to-hardware ratio, but at the end of the day it's the same exact thing in the diagram from 1965.

[liquidgecka]

yea I totally missed the CDU. I thought this was a project I had talked with a hardware person about a few years ago where there was no intermediate transfer and when I read the article I completely missed the section between the images. Rack level water cooling is interesting and I am sure they are doing some really cool bits on it but it’s not as revolutionary as a zero transfer system that I had thought they were talking through. I updated the comment to call out my error and reduce my excitement. =/

[I am still annoyed at how many people are dismissive of Google’s datacenter work simply because “severs have been water cooled before” which completely misses the point of datacenter level cooling. I also learned that AWS is doing this already, along with some elements of OVH] =)