Monitoring Coolant Health In Today's Direct-To-Chip Cooling Systems

With data center demand growing, there is an increased focus on using more heat-intensive artificial intelligence-driven solutions to power facilities. This means there need to be better ways to keep things cool.

Direct-to-chip liquid cooling has emerged as a solution that not only keeps data centers cool but also supports energy efficiency, cost optimization and chip performance. 

Ecolab, a global leader in water, hygiene and infection prevention solutions, has for decades been involved in coolant management, which helps to maintain, monitor and optimize the quality and efficiency of cooling systems. Tim Cassidy, marketing director for Ecolab’s global high-tech division, said direct-to-chip liquid cooling brings cooling into the white space of the data center, where all of the information technology equipment is located. 

“What's changed in the last couple of years is that as AI chips have become more powerful, there's a need to cool those chips directly with fluid in the servers to enable those high-power AI workings,” he said. “Cooling was traditionally handled outside of the white space, and the challenge is we now have new maintenance demands with fluid coming into this area and coolant going directly to the chip.”

Cassidy said this has created some pain points for data center operators. Starting with the commissioning stage, owners need to verify that cooling systems can handle the extreme heat loads of high-performance processors. Cassidy said that if the commissioning process isn’t consistent, this can lead to downstream impact in direct-to-chip loops and potential containment, which hinders performance and heat transfer. 

In post-commissioning — monitoring, optimizing and maintaining a facility’s systems after the data center is fully operational — there's a lot of variability in how the equipment operates, such as how the blade servers, or blades, are changed in and out of the systems as part of the maintenance routines. There is a risk for contamination in the systems when the blades are changed out, which could be a catalyst for other issues. 

“Some of the bigger issues that we see with key performance indicators are glycol dilution and degradation,” Cassidy said. “Eighty percent of the industry uses glycol because it’s biostatic and guards against microbial growth in these closed-loop systems. However, dilution or degradation of that glycol can then remove that biostatic property and lead to potential risk in that loop.”

Another pain point that needs to be addressed is the lack of real-time visibility. Cassidy said operators need to understand the health of a data center’s coolant at all times. He said this is a critical step to improve outcomes for its customers. Cassidy sees a growing need for predictability, control and automated monitoring to effectively manage direct-to-chip cooling systems. 

Cassidy said that for the last decade, Ecolab has been focused on supporting cooling optimization for data centers. One of its key products is its 3D Trasar technology, which provides real-time insight into coolant health for direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems.

The company centers on an approach of design clean, start clean and operate clean. It uses this framework to manage and remind its customers of how critical each step of the cooling process is. 

Ecolab is working to standardize this process. The firm wrote a white paper for this year’s Open Compute Project Global Summit and presented it with its partner Nvidia.

“The white paper talks about best practices around commissioning technology control loop systems,” Cassidy said. “We’re trying to help the industry come up with open-source best practices, procedures and processes, as well as lead the industry with our 3D Trasar technology.”

Ecolab used 3D Trasar for a hyperscale client that was deploying direct-to-chip systems across multiple sites. Cassidy said the client was in the commissioning phase of its deployment and noticed some issues with turbidity spiking, an indicator of water contamination that could lead to hardware damage and cooling system failures. The client also experienced glycol degradation during the process, so it reached out to Ecolab for help.

Ecolab implemented 3D Trasar to help structure a flush and filtration process for the client’s coolant system. 

“As they flushed these new loops out and prepared for ongoing operations, we were monitoring and managing the health of that coolant along the way,” Cassidy said. “When the water was more turbid or there might be glycol concentration boosting needs, we made sure we got a fluid into that loop that was very healthy and ready to be fully commissioned and turned over for operations.”

The flush and infiltration solution, through 3D Trasar, enabled a 40% reduction in commissioning time, helping the customer expedite speed to uptime while stabilizing fluid quality, which was crucial for its data center client, Cassidy said. 

“The implementation of automated monitoring provided long-term confidence and peace of mind that the fluid that was put into that system at commissioning was of the right quality and health so that the customer could confidently move forward into the operational phase of their data center,” he said. 

Cassidy said Ecolab wants to focus on the entire value chain when thinking about coolant management and data centers overall, especially for new AI data center deployments. He said he believes that design, startup and staying clean will be the key drivers for operating success. 

“We see post-commissioning as an opportunity to bring critical insights and value-added, technology-forward solutions that are based on our industrial expertise to support cooling from site to chip across the entire data center,” he said. “From traditional cooling to direct-to-chip liquid cooling in the white space, we want to support the industry and our customers, helping them deliver for today while preparing for the future with new technology and solutions that are coupled with our expertise on-site.”

This article was produced in collaboration between Ecolab and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.