Liquid Cooling of Compute System

Abstract

The continued demand for increasing compute performance results in an increasing system power and power density of many computers. The increased power requires more efficient cooling solutions than traditionally used air cooling. Therefore, liquid cooling, which has traditionally been used for large data center deployments, is becoming more mainstream. Liquid cooling can be used selectively to cool the high power components or the whole compute system. In this paper, the example of a fully liquid cooled server is used to describe different ingredients needed, together with the design challenges associated with them. The liquid cooling ingredients are cooling distribution unit (CDU), fluid, manifold, quick disconnects (QDs), and cold plates. Intel is driving an initiative to accelerate liquid cooling implementation and deployment by enabling the ingredients above. The functionality of these ingredients is discussed in this paper, while cold plates are discussed in detail.