Nvidia has announced its new plan to reduce energy use by data centers that collect huge amounts of data or train artificial intelligence models: liquid-cooled graphics cards (GPUs).
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The company announced at Computex that it is showing off a liquid-cooled version of its A100 compute card, which it says uses 30 percent less power than the air-cooled version. Nvidia promises that this won't be the only one, and it already has plans to announce more liquid-cooled server cards. The company seems to be hinting that it will bring the technology to other applications, such as automotive systems that need to be kept cool in enclosed spaces.
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According to Nvidia, reducing the energy required to perform complex calculations could have a big impact — the company says data centers use more than one percent of the world’s electricity , and 40 percent of that is due to cooling. A reduction of nearly a third would be a big deal, though it’s worth noting that graphics cards are only part of the equation . CPUs, storage, and networking equipment also draw power and need cooling. Nvidia’s claim is that with liquid cooling, GPU-accelerated systems would be much more efficient than CPU-only servers at artificial intelligence and other high-performance tasks .
There's a reason liquid cooling is popular in high-performance use cases, from supercomputers to custom gaming PCs and even some phones: Liquids absorb heat better than air, according to Asetek, a major manufacturer of water-cooling systems. And when you have hot liquid, it's relatively easy to move it elsewhere to cool it down, compared to trying to cool the air in an entire building or increasing airflow to the specific components of a card that are dumping all the heat.
In addition to energy efficiency, liquid-cooled cards have another advantage over their air-cooled counterparts — they take up much less space, which means you can fit more of them in the same space.
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Nvidia's push to reduce energy use through liquid cooling comes at a time when many companies are looking at the amount of energy servers . While data centers are far from the only source of carbon emissions and pollution for big tech, they are a piece of the puzzle that can't be ignored. Companies like Microsoft have experimented with completely submerging servers in liquid and even placing entire data centers in the ocean in an effort to use less energy and water.
Source of information: theverge.com
