Advanced Thermal Solution for High Performance Server System Energy Efficiency

As data explosion dramatically accelerating from IoT (Internet of Thing)edge devices, high performance server has been dominating deployment in the recent CSPs (Cloud Service Providers)data center for conquering the challenge of huge amount of data processing on cloud computing. Microprocessor architecture advance, continues to involve with more core count, higher frequency, as well as larger on-die memory cache size, pursuing for higher computing performance while trade off with more power consumption. Nowadays, conventional thermal solutions for high performance high power processor in server system have been reaching the limit even with maximum optimization and luxurious design. The conventional air cooling solution is limited by the mainboard spatial keep-out zone and high dense placement, while liquid cooling has not been widely adopted yet by CSPs due to reliability and economical solution readiness issue. In this paper, an advanced thermal solution based on thermosiphon technology for Intel high performance server processors with shadowed placement is detail introduced with Baidu engineering design practice and data center deployment. This solution directly contributed to server system achieving a 12 times improvement on OPEX (Operating Expense)comparing to conventional solutions. Even when considering its relatively higher CAPEX (Capital Expenditure), calculation shows that the overall TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)is lower than traditional solutions starting from 0.36 year after field deployment benefited from energy saving.