With the rapid development of technology, the energy consumption and heat dissipation problems of data centers are becoming increasingly prominent. Traditional air-cooled servers are already struggling to meet the challenges of high-density computing and large-scale data processing. Compared with the traditional air cooling system, the emerging liquid cooling system can greatly reduce energy consumption and heat dissipation problems. In the context of the country's policy of mandatory carbon reduction in data centers, liquid-cooled servers have sprung up and ushered in explosive growth.
Recently, according to the reporter, at the artificial intelligence computing conference, the international data company IDC and Inspur Information jointly released the "2023-2024 Chinese Intelligent Computing Power Development Assessment Report", IDC predicts that in 2022-2027, China's liquid-cooled server market will reach a compound annual growth rate of 547%, and the market size will reach $9.5 billion by 2027.
It has become a foregone conclusion that the liquid cooling system will gradually replace the air cooling system, and the main reason is the problem of the explosion of computing power
The reason for the explosion of computing power
The fundamental reason for the explosion of computing power lies in the imbalance between supply and demand, and the supply side is mainly restricted by factors such as CPU development limits, traffic costs, and carbon emissions, and the marginal cost performance of centralized computing power is weakening. And the total scale of computing power in China now reaches 197 trillion petaflop floating-point operations, ranking second in the world!The average annual growth rate of computing power in the past five years is nearly 30!
And 2023 will be a year of explosive growth of China's computing power industry. This year, policies at all levels have frequently led the way for the high-quality development of computing power, accelerated the improvement of computing infrastructure construction, and "blowout" the layout of intelligent computing power and the innovative application of computing power, accelerated the deep integration of data and reality, and the continuous growth of the scale of the computing power industry, becoming a new engine for economic growth, etc., so computing power has been unbalanced and has grown explosively.
Liquid cooling technology changes from cold to hot
With the explosion of computing power, the power consumption of chips equipped with computing power is increasing day by day, and the problem of heat dissipation has become one of the unavoidable problems in the intelligent computing industry. Industry insiders pointed out that for every 10 degrees increase in chip temperature, the failure rate will be doubled, and the life span will be halved. On the other hand, when the typical power of the chip exceeds 300W and the power consumption per square centimeter exceeds 90W, the upper limit of the air-cooled system has been reached, and the power consumption of mainstream chip products in the industry has already exceeded this threshold.
Liquid cooling is not a new technology, as early as the 60s and 90s of the last century, liquid cooling was also used in data centers. However, at that time, in the era of Moore's Law, the power consumption of chips continued to decrease, and expensive liquid cooling technology was gradually shelved.
However, now the chip power is getting higher and higher, the power density of a single cabinet is getting larger and larger, and liquid cooling technology is rapidly becoming popular, and it has gradually become the mainstream solution for green data centers. Liquid-cooled servers are divided into three types: cold plate type, immersion type, and spray type, among which the cold plate type technology is relatively mature and has been commercialized on a large scale. Compared with the cold plate type, the immersion type has obvious advantages in heat dissipation efficiency, single cabinet power and space utilization, and is the best solution for liquid cooling, but the construction cost and use cost are high, and further technological breakthroughs are still needed.
Giants have entered the liquid cooling market
Industry insiders pointed out that 2022 is the first year of liquid cooling for data centers. In 2023, the promotion and popularization of liquid cooling solutions will deepen rapidly, and the market penetration rate is expected to reach 20-30%.
At the 2022 Full Connect Conference, Huawei officially launched the all-liquid-cooled Tiancheng Diversified Computing Platform. A year later, at the Ascend World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), Huawei showcased the Atlas 900 computing power cluster integrated with the Tiancheng liquid-cooled computing platform, which supports the scale of 10,000 cards.
In addition to Huawei, Lenovo has upgraded the "Poseidon" warm water cooling system, which can realize the full water-cooled fanless design of serversSugon's Sugon Digital Innovation released the "Cold Balance" strategy, launching full-stack liquid-cooled data center technology and one-stop service for the whole life cycleH3C also combines servers, core routers, and access switches to launch a full-stack liquid cooling solution. Giants are vying to enter the game, the industry is booming, and data centers are moving towards the era of liquid cooling. IDC's data shows that in terms of market structure, Inspur Information, Ningchang, and Super Fusion have become the top three liquid-cooled servers, accounting for about 70% of the market share, and liquid cooling instead of air cooling has become a major trend in the industry.
In the context of "digital economy" and "dual carbon", the cold-plate liquid-cooled server developed by the Fuchuang team has continuously improved the heat flux density of chips and the strict energy consumption design of equipment, which is required to become the two driving forces for the continuous evolution of server heat dissipation methods and data center cooling technology. In addition, the cold plate liquid-cooled server developed by the Fuchuang team has the advantages of low energy consumption, high heat dissipation, low noise, low TCO, etc., and is a large server deployed in the cabinet, and is equipped with a leakage detection function, which can make the data irreversible.
In the future, Fuchuang will also deepen the research and design of liquid cooling technology, continue to innovate and apply in the fields of direct cooling and indirect cooling, and expand a broader space for the green development of China's information industry.
Summary
With the increasing awareness of environmental protection and the increasing problem of energy consumption in data centers, the future of liquid-cooled servers is very promising. In the future, with the advancement of technology and the reduction of costs, liquid-cooled servers are expected to become the mainstream cooling technology for data centers.