Cooling server farms and suchlike things.

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Cooling server farms and suchlike things.

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Hairyloon

Joined: 20 Nov 2008
Posts: 15438
Location: Today I are mostly being in Yorkshire.

Posted: Mon Feb 24, 25 4:33 pm Post subject: Cooling server farms and suchlike things.

I was recently moved to think about the cooling systems for server farms and other high intensity IT applications and wondered if anyone anywhere has tried recovering some of the energy through heat engines to make electricity.

The instinctive response is that it goes against the laws of thermodynamics, but I think that it does not because of the amount of energy being pumped into the system.

As a thought experiment, if you connect a heat engine to a dynamo and drive a heat engine with an electric fire, then will the dynamo produce electricity?
If the engine, dynamo and heat source are suitably matched, then of course it will. It would be horrendously inefficient, but that's not the point because instead of the electric fire, we have a bank of processors doing useful work.

As is, they do that work and generate heat which is typically thrown away, although in some cases it is used for heating...

Which brings me to another thought: where people are using electricity for heating, why not put that electricity through a bank of processors first and do some calculations with it?

Leaving aside the question of what calculations we might do, as far as I can work out, we would get the same amount of heat either way, so the only reason to not do it is the cost of the hardware, and how many obsolete graphics cards are there sat tucked away in drawers?

Slim

Joined: 05 Mar 2006
Posts: 6633
Location: New England (In the US of A)

Posted: Mon Feb 24, 25 7:21 pm Post subject:
Pairing processing with heat generation has certainly been done with crypto miners https://time.com/7017395/bitcoin-data-center-heat-bathhouses/

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 16100

Posted: Tue Feb 25, 25 8:23 am Post subject:

It isn't against thermodynamics because the electricity being used produces heat but has done some 'work'. There will be less energy produced as heat than is put in in electrical power.

Of course it is far better to power these places with power from renewable resources.

In the early days of electronics cooling was a major problem and I don't know how valve operations were cooled, but by the time of transistors it was quite possible to build a radio in a cigarette box that would spontaneously ignite. Even early ICs had enormous (relative to the size) cooling fins on them. Modern chips use far less power, and thus heat, but are a lot better than they were.

Hairyloon

Joined: 20 Nov 2008
Posts: 15438
Location: Today I are mostly being in Yorkshire.

Posted: Tue Feb 25, 25 10:53 pm Post subject:

Slim wrote:

Pairing processing with heat generation has certainly been done with crypto miners https://time.com/7017395/bitcoin-data-center-heat-bathhouses/

I'd heard about that, but my thought there was on the domestic scale: instead of heating the room with a little fan heater, heat the room with a little fan heater that's doing loads of calculations.

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