Nick Yates on Travel

Author: Nick Yates

All that heat your office computers put out in the course of enabling your company to stay connected daily with the marketplace — suppose it could be captured and channeled in useful ways?

The next approach to providing efficient cooling for increasingly powerful IT hardware systems may be a move away from air cooling toward water cooling.  Especially as the trend toward stacking computer chips one on top of another internally, to improve communication between them, is making heat dissipation a problem that threatens to outgrow traditional air-cooling solutions.  In the huge regional data centers which have sprung up to handle the flow and storage of information, a more efficient manner of handling excess heat is already much needed.

Some technicians are thinking out of the box to solve this problem.  Innovations such as micro-sized circulation channels fabricated into high performance silicon chips, for instance, allow water to circulate through and cool critical parts.  Water, even in miniscule amounts, can absorb heat thousands of times more efficiently than mere air.  And water’s cooling efficiency may become absolutely necessary as computers continue to gain computing power while simultaneously shrinking in size.

The heat from a medium-sized data center, consuming one megawatt of power, could potentially be used to heat about seventy average-sized homes!  Suppose the heat transferred out of your company’s own number-crunching computers could be channeled to heat your own office space or that of your entire building?  Or perhaps used to lessen the need for electricity to heat water for sanitation or production purposes?

Pairing a necessary function such as equipment cooling with other critical needs could have a very real effect on the total output of pollutants by municipal power plants.  While lowering office electricity bills, this otherwise wasted heat energy could be recycled into useful purposes that both save money and lessen the dependence on outside resources.

With today’s emphasis on “green” living, that could prove popular indeed. This has been Nick Yates with another installment of business tactics.