Claudius Feger
IBM Research - Brazil
Rio de Janeiro & Yorktown Hts., NY
Abstract: The server industry faces several major energy problems: US data centers in 2010 used 2% of the energy produced in the US with a growth rate of about 15% per year. And to get more performance out of micro-processors chip power densities must continue to increase. Both of these trends have led to the undesirable situation that the cost of operating a high performance system is quickly nearing the cost of buying such a system, a situation which makes both sales people and IT owners rather unhappy. Rappidly increasing energy prices add additional urgency. The solution to both of these problems is arguably achieved by improvements in cooling technology. For data centers this includes solutions reaching from optimizing data center floor plans, to the rather dramatic immersion of complete systems into cooling oils, to "free" air cooling in colder climes, to the use of warm water generated by data centers for supply of hot water for dwellings. On the microelectronics processor side solutions involve high performance heat sinks, to microchannel cooling, to immersion cooling, and novel materials. Various solutions and future approaches to computing addressing these issues will be discussed.