Comment by lostlogin
1 year ago
If rack mounted, you are ending up with something like a reverse power station.
So why not use it as an energy source? Spin a turbine.
1 year ago
If rack mounted, you are ending up with something like a reverse power station.
So why not use it as an energy source? Spin a turbine.
If you let the chip actual boil enough water to run a turbine you're going to have a hard time keeping the magic smoke inside. Much better to run at reasonable temps and try to recover energy from the waste heat.
What if you chose a refrigerant with a lower boiling point?
That's basically the principle of binary cycle[1] generators. However for data center waste heat recovery, I'd think you'd want to use a more stable fluid for cooling, and then pump it to a separate closed-loop binary-cycle generator. No reason to make your datacenter cooling system also deal with high pressure fluids, and moving high pressure working fluid from 1000s of chips to a turbine of sufficient size, etc.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_cycle
There's a bunch of places in Europe that use waste heat from datacenters in district heating systems. Same thing with waste heat from various industrial processes. It's relatively common practice.
If my very stale physics is accurate then even with perfect thermodynamic efficiency you would only recover about a third of the energy that you put into the chips.
1/3 > 0, so even if you don't get a $0 energy bill I'd venture that any company that could get 1/3 of energy bill would be happy
I'm aware of the efficiency losses but I think it would be amusing to use that turbine to help power the machine generating the heat.
Hey, we're building artificial general intelligence, what's a little perpetual motion on the side?