Nvidia to build digital twin for advanced liquid cooling

Technology News | May 27, 2023

By Nick Flaherty

Software & Embedded tools Power Management

Engineers at Nvidia are working on a major US project to develop a new combination liquid cooling system for data centres, along with a full digital twin.

The $5m Coolerchips programme, funded by the US Department of Energy, will combine immersive and

“This is another example of how we’re rearchitecting the data centre,” said Ali Heydari, a distinguished engineer at Nvidia who leads the project and helped deploy more than a million servers in previous roles at Baidu, Twitter and Facebook.

The CPU and GPU chips in the server will be cooled with cold plates and volatile coolants. Then the entire server will be encased in hermetically sealed containers and immersed in a dielectric coolant.

This approach promises to cool a data centre in a mobile container at temperatures up to 40 degrees Celsius and when drawing 200kW and 20% higher efficiency. The programme is aiming for compute systems with an energy density of over 80kW/m3, equivalent to about >3kW per server. COOLERCHIPS aims to be commercially competitive with current state-of-the-art solutions by offering a lower total cost of ownership without compromising data centre reliability and availability.

The team of a dozen thermal, power, mechanical and systems engineers is also creating a full digital twin of the system using Nvidia’s Omniverse tool.

They are working with seven partners, including Binghamton and Villanova universities in analysis, testing and simulation, BOYD for the cold plates and Durbin Group for the pumping system. Honeywell will help select the refrigerant while Vertiv will work on the heat dissipation.

“We’re extending relationships we’ve built for years, and each group brings an array of engineers,” said Heydari.

www.nvidia.com