Cooling Performance Testing of Attaway’s Negative Pressure CDU

Two-Phase, or Not Two-Phase. After all, that is the question. At least it is for data center cooling architects and planners seeking to maximize cooling efficiency and performance for their ever-growing fleets of servers with the use of liquid-cooling. The use of water-based cold plate and dielectric immersion liquid cooling solutions have seen rapid increases in adoption over the past few product generations with a growth rate that continues to accelerate. With the acceptance (or to borrow the cliché “democratization”) of liquid in the data center, would-be customers of liquid-cooled servers are now turning their attention towards two-phase (or latent) liquid cooling technologies based upon these fluids’ non-conductive properties and potential for improved performance and efficiency when compared to water-based cold plate and single-phase immersion solutions. These changes include an immediate change from an idle compute load to full load (Linpack) as well as running Linpack without any water cooling from Attaway’s CDUs. It was discovered that Attaway could respond to sudden compute load changes very well, never throttling any nodes. When Linpack was run without water cooling, the system was able to operate for a short time before throttling happened.