Getting closer to Jim Gray's "smoking hairy golf ball" (Jim also forecasted that chips would eventually become spherical to limit the lengths of the data paths.)
It will be interesting to see if commercial data centers re-fit with cooling water transport under the floor or above the machines (riskier). This will be a challenge for DCs without a lot of space under there, presumably they could boost the floor height after a door transition. Still how many of them have 20 - 40kW of power allocated per rack.
Its one of the few times I miss being at Google because they approached this sort of problem very creatively and with an effectively unlimited budget to try different things. I'm sure their data centers are very much different from my time there!
I had the chance to visit the new datacenter of my college and on the server exhaust side there is a radiator as tall as the rack with cold water in it. All the pipes are under the floor.
IIRC they mainly put power hungry compute nodes for the clusters in this new datacenter and I remember that servers full of GPUs had crazy power draw. The water then goes through an heat exchanger to help generate hot water to heat the campus and for the taps.
It will be interesting to see if commercial data centers re-fit with cooling water transport under the floor or above the machines (riskier). This will be a challenge for DCs without a lot of space under there, presumably they could boost the floor height after a door transition. Still how many of them have 20 - 40kW of power allocated per rack.
Its one of the few times I miss being at Google because they approached this sort of problem very creatively and with an effectively unlimited budget to try different things. I'm sure their data centers are very much different from my time there!