[Beowulf] immersion cooling for ASIC Bitcoin miners

Prentice Bisbal prentice.bisbal at rutgers.edu
Wed Nov 27 11:41:10 PST 2013


On 11/26/2013 10:28 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> 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.
Bitcoin values are raging out of control right now. It's possible they 
can come out ahead, as long as they cash in before this bubble bursts. 
Two smaller bubbles have already burst for bitcoin in the past few 
years, so I have no doubt this one will burst too. Just look at what's 
happened in the past 6 months:

http://blockchain.info/charts/market-price?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=
>
>> 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.
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