In several of my past columns, I have discussed liquid cooling. It would appear my articles over the past five years have had their effect, since lately it seems like almost everyone is offering some form of liquid cooling system. Moreover, chip manufacturers have begun to design more powerful processors that can only be liquid-cooled, so the end must be in sight for air-cooled computing hardware.
While that prediction may seem a bit of an overreach, there is clearly a greater amount of awareness and interest in liquid cooling in different sectors, and it’s being driven by various applications and motivations. Liquid cooling was originally used on early mainframes 50 years ago. While it effectively disappeared for a few decades, it began to reemerge with new supercomputers and high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Nonetheless, air-cooled IT equipment still dominates the majority of traditional data centers. Still, the primary factors that drive the mainstream enterprise and colocation facilities markets are function, performance, and cost-effectiveness.