SINGAPORE

GIVE ‘EM A SPRAY

Data centres in Singapore account for 7 per cent of the nation’s total electricity consumption. With demand for cloud computing increasing, a sustainable solution is needed to reduce the country’s energy consumption and carbon footprint.

Now, researchers from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore say they have developed a more sustainable method for cooling down servers in data centres, potentially reducing both energy costs and carbon footprint by up to 26 per cent.

The new method uses a special spray of non conductive fluids to cool the CPU directly, without a heatsink. A closed loop system is designed to collect the fluids and cool them in tropical ambient air temperature without the need of a chiller or air conditioning.

“This will also allow CPUs to run faster and perform better than today’s speeds, which are limited by air cooling, since faster speeds currently lead to higher temperatures,” the researchers say.

“As spray cooling has a higher heat rejection capability, it is estimated it will also require 30 per cent less space than a conventional air cooled data centre.” ■