[Beowulf] clustering using off the shelf systems in a fish tank full of oil.

[Prentice Bisbal]

There has been a company at the SC conferences for the past 3 years 
trying to sell exactly that (server cooling by submersion in mineral 
oil) for the past 3 years.

In my opinion it, suffers from a few major problems:

1. It's messy. If you every have to take hardware out of the oil to 
repair/replace, it's messy. The oil could drip all over, creating safety 
hazards. And if you need to remove a hardware component from a server, 
good luck! Now that everything is oily and slippery, there definitely 
will be a problem with that hard drive once it flies out of your hands, 
even if there wasn't a problem with it before!

2. The weight of the mineral oil. Despite the density of current 1-U and 
blade systems, I still think that air makes up a not-significant 
percentage of volume of the full rack. Fill that space with a liquid 
like mineral oil, and I'm sure you double, triple, or maybe even 
quadruple the weight load on your datacenter's raised floor.

--
Prentice



http://msds.farnam.com/m000712.htm

On 12/23/2011 2:32 PM, Jonathan Aquilina wrote:
>
> I am just curious as to everyones take on this
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtufuXLvOok
>
> Being able to over clock the systems how much more performance gains can
> one get out of them
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