[Beowulf] immersion cooling for ASIC Bitcoin miners

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 10:22:16AM -0500, Ellis H. Wilson III wrote:

> I have heard (a long time ago, admittedly) from little overclocking 
> birdies that in poorly-designed or tightly-packed arrangements, putting 
> an aquarium bubbler or some such hacky bubbling mechanism allows you to 
> avoid the hotspots in the oil you would otherwise suffer from around 

This is one of 3M Fluorinerts (not at all cheap), so there is phase change 
enthalpy as the liquid boils -- I presume there is a heat exchanger at the
top where it condenses, and drips down again.

The ASIC-bearing boards are vertical, so there should be considerable
bubble-assisted convection.

The reason why I posted it is that these guys obviously expect to
recover the expense of building and operating the data center by way 
of mined Bitcoins. Not sure it will turn out as planned.

> your main heating components (passively cooled bridges in home setups 
> are known issues here).  Overall bubbles don't help heat dissipation 
> (and may hurt it as suggested), but if your problem isn't the overall 
> temp of the tank but instead making sure the temp is fairly average 
> throughout, bubbles may help.  I've kept my mouth shut on the matter so 
> far because I have no proper training in the area to ground this 
> suggestion on.