Conventional cooling challenges solved in unconventional manner
When Hong Kong-based startup Allied Control embarked on building the world’s largest 64 kW Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) system, it seemed that air cooling was the only practical way to deal with the issue of thermal management. Fast forward just two years, and the company is rapidly becoming the go-to-specialist for passive two-phase immersion cooling, with their very own immersion cooling platform in a modular 19-in. server rack form-factor.
“As we were researching alternative ways to cool our FPGA cluster, we have looked at various other ways such as water or oil cooling. That’s when one of our engineers happened to show us a video on YouTube from 3M,” says Kar-Wing Lau, Allied’s vice president of operations. “The video described a new passive liquid immersion cooling technique that offered dramatic efficiencies in energy usage and power density, without the need for complex and expensive sealed vessels, cold plates, heat sinks, or node level cooling hardware. The kinds of efficiencies they were projecting almost seemed like science fiction, but we felt it was worth a look.”