[Beowulf] /. Cooler room or cooler servers?

[Andrew Piskorski]

On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 12:42:33PM -0400, Mark Hahn wrote:

> is it possible to make a flexible heatpipe?  if there was a sealed 
> heatpipe that sucked heat off my CPUs, that would make the problem 

Yes, because Google says (partially) flexible heat pipes do exist:

  http://www.cheresources.com/htpipes.shtml
  http://www.colorado.edu/engineering/ASEN/asen5519/1999-Files/11heatpump.htm
  http://www.thermacore.com/lcs_components.htm
  http://www.electronics-cooling.com/Resources/EC_Articles/SEP96/sep96_02.htm

The real engineering work for using heat pipes with rackmounted
servers has probably already been done, somewhere.  I've no idea what
these heat pipe setups might cost, but operationally, since heat pipes
are completely sealed and passive, seems they should avoid most of the
problems of the water cooled rigs marketed to overclockers - leaky
hoses above every motherboard, tiny water channels corroding and
clogging, water pumps breaking down, etc.

-- 
Andrew Piskorski <atp at piskorski.com>
http://www.piskorski.com/