Thermal Architecture Will Cut Data Centre Energy Usage

According to the International Energy Agency, by 2025 data centres will use 20% of all the electricity generated worldwide. In fact, that estimate may turn out on the low side with the rapid growth of video conferencing and other web based activities during the COVID-19 epidemic, when many of us worked from home. The overall amount used is also predicted to continue rising as demand for data-based services increases. That number would still be a concern if all that electricity was used by the servers for processing, but as servers are not 100% efficient, heat is given off. That heat needs cooling to protect the board from overheating and components either being destroyed or having shorting working lifetimes. Cooling is achieved either through fans and/or water cooling, both of which require energy themselves to operate. The use of electricity for cooling is around the same as the amount that is used by the servers themselves, both at around 43% of total energy used, according to think tank Energy Innovation. Reducing the amount of cooling required by data centres would be economically efficient, and at the same time cut the carbon emissions from the data centre and with the amount of water needed for cooling. McKinsey estimates that data centres can emit 80 megatonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

To attempt to develop a solution to cutting the amount of active cooling required in data centres, Nokia Bell Labs was selected for OPEN 2021 funding by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop a highly efficient thermal energy architecture that will deliver a reduction in data centre cooling energy, capture waste heat for heating and cooling applications. The goal of this Nokia Bell Labs research program is a dramatic reduction in compute cooling energy to 5% or less while eliminating the need to consume water supplies.

With ARPA-E support, Nokia Bell Labs and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign along with associate partners will explore a highly efficient, resource-conserving thermal energy architecture that will simultaneously improve energy efficiency of high-power-compute-cooling and deliver high-quality thermal energy that can be used directly for heating and cooling applications. By pursuing a low-cost, low-energy two-phase cooling philosophy from chip to room scale, the proposed technology will rearchitect compute infrastructure to provide a valuable heat source in a way that is practical and cost-effective.

Peter Vetter, President of Bell Labs Core Research, said: “At Bell Labs, we find the technology limits and push beyond them to tackle the hard challenges. Working with ARPA-E and our partners, we will look at how we can allow for sustainable growth. Our goal is to play a positive role in tackling climate change in the U.S. by reducing and re-using the energy flowing through the compute and communications hardware that delivers the digital services we all increasingly rely on. By using resources in a more efficient way, we will be able to increase our use of AI in our networks without requiring more energy than we use today.”