[Beowulf] Servers Too Hot? Intel Recommends a Luxurious Oil Bath

[Vincent Diepeveen]

I read a report somewhere some big CERN type projectmembers were  
warnng that other areas
of science shouldn't waste helium, especially not for balloons,
as when it escapes it leaves planet earth and they need
it badly to cool down things and foresee a problem for the far future  
as what left planet
earth never gets back.

Any truth in that?

On Sep 4, 2012, at 3:29 PM, John Hearns wrote:

> On 4 September 2012 14:16, Robert G. Brown <rgb at phy.duke.edu> wrote:
>>
>> On a more serious note, one wonders why nobody has tried helium  
>> instead.
>> No, silly, not liquid helium, helium gas.  The reason they fill  
>> windows
>> with argon is that it has around 2/3 the thermal conductivity of air,
>> and hence is a better insulator.  This, in turn, is because it is  
>> more
>> massive -- conductivity is tightly tied to mass and hence the  
>> speed of
>> the molecules when they have kT sorts of energies.
>>
>> Helium, OTOH, has six times the thermal conductivity of air, and is
>> relatively inexpensive.
>
> Helium was also used in Formula 1 wheel guns.
> Wheel guns are the comoressed air tools which the mechanics use in a
> pit stop to undo
> and refasten the wheel nuts - the faster you can do this the faster
> the car gets back out on the track.
> Lower inertia means the guns were spinning faster.
>
> http://jalopnik.com/5863687/a-farewell-to-helium+powered-wheel-guns
>
> As this article points out, helium is a finite resource. If all teams
> were using it, there would
> be no advantage to any one team and it would be wasteful of a  
> resource.
> If I'm nto wrong the US Government holds the biggest stock of helium,
> somewhere in a salt some in Texas.
> And not more of it is being produced in the world.
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