In a potentially major breakthrough for data centers, 3M Co. announced Tuesday a new cooling fluid for large computer systems that reduces the need for powerful air conditioners and slashes energy costs by 95 percent.
Partnering with Intel Corp. and SGI, the Maplewood-based conglomerate calls the technology immersion cooling, in which computers actually sit inside a cooling bath. On Tuesday, about 20 3M, Intel and SGI officials demonstrated how the new 3M Novec Engineered Fluid worked on a supercomputer inside 3M's headquarters.
"This is potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars," said Joseph Koch, 3M's business director of chemicals and semiconductor materials. "Think about all the data centers being used now and the energy they are consuming. Then think about the fact that we can reduce the cooling demands by 95 percent."
The new system looked like a giant fishtank. SGI made the hardware, while Intel's microprocessors sat inside the tank and were cooled by 3M's Novec fluid, which looked like water.
But this specialty fluid dried immediately, left no residue and was safe on electronics. In fact, visitors took turns Tuesday dunking fingers, cell phones and even cameras into the solution. Nothing was harmed, even though the fluid was boiling.
The cooling technology is being portrayed as a possible game changer for massive data centers, which have proliferated in recent years with the rise of cloud-based networks and as storage for "big data" applications have been increasingly used by businesses and government.
But data centers also suck up lots of energy as they run computer servers, store information and work to cool off hot machines. Such data hubs now consume about 2 percent of all U.S. energy and have pushed Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM and others to explore energy-cutting solutions, said officials at the industry tracking firm IDC Datacenter Trends and Strategies.
The fluid is expected to not only cut energy costs but to also reduce water consumption. That's because it eliminates the need for municipal water commonly used for evaporative cooling. The end result is that large data centers can operate in one-tenth the space normally required because of large air conditioning, fanning and water systems.
