At OCP Summit 2019, Wiwynn showed a two-phase immersion cooling system. At Computex 2019, the company had an immersion cooling solution on hand that cooled Open Compute Project (OCP) nodes. The version we saw in Taipei is the same one that we previously saw in the company’s video and slightly different than what we saw in San Jose earlier this year.
Wiwynn Two-Phase Immersion Cooling System for OCP Nodes
Here is the overall tank. It uses 3M Flourinert Engineered fluid to ensure the components do not short when being immersed. One can also see the LCD status panel on the front of the tank along with a window showing a dual Intel Xeon Scalable Tioga Pass node.
Inside the server, one can find up to 60x 1kW nodes and the entire system is rated for 100kW TDP. In the rear of the nodes one can see a copper heat exchanger. There is an active condenser internally to eliminate vapor leakage.
The nodes themselves are the vanity-free OCP front I/O designs. They are powered using a 48V OCP bus bar below.
Although most of the show floor nodes were blanks, one can see these three nodes in operation. One can also see the fluid circulation in the tank near the bottom of that photo.
Wiwynn has a video on the system.
Final Words
As chip TDP increases well into the 200W-300W range this year, cooling needs to be addressed. The Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 pushing almost 400W is not seeing broad industry support because packages are in the 350-400W range. See Why the Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 Series Lacks Mainstream Support. Hyperscale data center operators are going to need to find better cooling solutions just to handle future generations of gear. Immersion cooling is what several hyper-scale customers are looking at to handle the cooling load as we showed in Alibaba Immersion Cooling at Scale Research. Wiwynn has a design that offers more than just the two-phase immersion cooling, also including telemetry data from the tank as well as serviceability engineering. We expect to see more immersion cooling in the near future as chips get hotter.
