The program's technology lines include the development of: (1) components related to the secondary cooling circuit that transfers heat from the servers to the facility's water or the primary cooling circuit, (2) modular/EDGE data center cooling systems that encompass both the secondary and primary cooling circuits, transferring heat from the facility's water to the environment, (3) innovative software for data center cooling systems that will include the ability to simultaneously model energy efficiency, reliability, CO2 footprint, and cost, and (4) support facilities for testing the new technologies developed in the first two pathways.
Innovation and Advantages:
All the electrical energy that enters a data center must ultimately be rejected as heat into the environment through a cooling system. Data center cooling can be energy-intensive; it can account for up to 33–40% of the data center's total energy consumption and uses hundreds of billions of gallons of fresh water annually.
As chip manufacturing processes reach critical limitations in scaling ever smaller transistors, processor power is expected to increase, driving up the power density of data centers. Furthermore, recent weather events have brought extreme heat, droughts, and other challenges, limiting the availability of sometimes scarce resources for cooling. Cooling energy for data centers is significant today, and these trends will make it an even more critical energy area in the future.
