[kayo_20211030]

> In favorable climates, NVIDIA’s 45-degree liquid-cooling architecture ....

What's a favorable climate, apart from, obviously, Greenland? The piece is a little light on details on the correlation between outside temperatures and efficiency & cost. It'd be nice to see even a broad-strokes discussion of that.

[notrealyme123]

The university where i studied uses high temperature cooling since a few years. The weather on Germany ranges to quite high temperatures, but according to the tech stuff they only need active (as in AC) cooling for the higher end of the 30 degrees. The technology is quite fascinating.

https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2024_038_kit-supercompute...

[kayo_20211030]

I lived in Munich many years ago, but if the temperature ever went to the high thirties for more than a day we'd expect the end of the world :-)

[mattmanser]

Speaking from a UK perspective global warming is now noticeable, hot days are hotter and there's more likely to be a heat wave, and that's changed in the last decade.

I assume Germany is the same, many years ago really is different to today.

[kayo_20211030]

For sure. Everywhere. Even observationally, we just all know it's hotter, or wetter, or colder - it's all way more extreme in all dimensions.

[matt-p]

Yeah, this is part of the issue to be honest. You'd need outdoor air to be below ~37°C to guarantee 45°C water outlet temperature. In most locations you still need cooling towers or compressors some of the time, so you still have to build all the infrastructure that comes with them; though reducing their use is still great, saving serious amounts of water or energy.

For e.g you might think of the outskirts of London as fairly moderate, but this week it's been hot enough that supplemental cooling would likely have been needed at points. For a data centre here you'd typically design the cooling system to cope with outdoor temps in excess of 40°C, which is not a conservative number anymore.

Also, while Nvidia might be happy with you supplying water at 45°C I suspect you will get better longevity of the hardware at lower temps like say 35°C. GPUs are expensive, and extending longevity may well be 'worth' a bit more water or energy to you. In practice you are also likely to have air cooled systems that sit 'beside' the AI compute like storage severs, any extra CPU compute and network switches. So you are likely to need a separate room and cooling system for that. Great progress though.

[frollogaston]

So they only have to actively cool when it's above 98˚F outside, that's still way better than what they do now

[matt-p]

Definitely!