Nvidia is taking some notes from the fanatic PC constructing crowd in an effort to scale back the carbon footprint of information facilities. The corporate introduced two new liquid-cooled GPUs throughout its Computex 2022 keynote, however they received’t be making their manner into your subsequent gaming PC.
As a substitute, the H100 (introduced at GTC earlier this yr) and A100 GPUs will ship as a part of HGX server racks towards the top of the yr. Liquid cooling isn’t new for the world of supercomputers, however mainstream knowledge heart servers haven’t historically been capable of entry this environment friendly cooling technique (not with out making an attempt to jerry-rig a gaming GPU right into a server, that’s).
Along with HGX server racks, Nvidia will provide the liquid-cooled variations of the H100 and A100 as slot-in PCIe playing cards. The A100 is coming within the second half of 2022, and the H100 is coming in early 2023. Nvidia says “at the least a dozen” system builders can have these GPUs out there by the top of the yr, together with choices from Asus, ASRock, and Gigabyte.
Knowledge facilities account for round 1% of the world’s complete electrical energy utilization, and nearly half of that electricity is spent solely on cooling all the things within the knowledge heart. Versus conventional air cooling, Nvidia says its new liquid-cooled playing cards can scale back energy consumption by round 30% whereas lowering rack house by 66%.
As a substitute of an all-in-one system such as you’d discover on a liquid-cooled gaming GPU, the A100 and H100 use a direct liquid connection to the processing unit itself. All the things however the feed strains is hidden within the GPU enclosure, which itself solely takes up one PCIe slot (versus two for the air-cooled variations).
Knowledge facilities take a look at energy utilization effectiveness (PUE) to gauge vitality utilization — basically a ratio between how a lot energy an information heart is drawing versus how a lot energy the computing is utilizing. With an air-cooled knowledge heart, Equinix had a PUE of about 1.6. Liquid cooling with Nvidia’s new GPUs introduced that right down to 1.15, which is remarkably near the 1.0 PUE knowledge facilities goal for.
Along with higher vitality effectivity, Nvidia says liquid cooling offers advantages for preserving water. The corporate says hundreds of thousands of gallons of water are evaporated in knowledge facilities every year to maintain air-cooled techniques working. Liquid cooling permits that water to recirculate, turning “a waste into an asset,” in accordance with head of edge infrastructure at Equinix Zac Smith.
Though these playing cards received’t present up within the large knowledge facilities run by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon — that are possible utilizing liquid cooling already — that doesn’t imply they received’t have an effect. Banks, medical establishments, and knowledge heart suppliers like Equinix compromise a big portion of the info facilities round immediately, and so they might all profit from liquid-cooled GPUs.
Nvidia says that is simply the beginning of a journey to carbon-neutral knowledge facilities, as properly. In a press launch, Nvidia senior product advertising supervisor Joe Delaere wrote that the corporate plans “to help liquid cooling in our high-performance knowledge heart GPUs and our Nvidia HGX platforms for the foreseeable future.”
Editors’ Alternative
