Intel selected for COOLERCHIPS program, committed to creating new cooling technology for future data centers

The ARPA-E program aims to more than triple the cooling efficiency of future 2-kilowatt processors

Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that 15 institutions, including Intel, have been selected to create high-performance, energy-efficient cooling solutions for future data centers. The news was announced in May and is part of the COOLERCHIPS initiative. The COOLERCHIPS program is supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) of the U.S. Department of Energy and aims to optimize the cooling operations of information processing systems to improve energy utilization, reliability and carbon efficiency. Among them, Intel's project will receive funding for a period of three years, totaling US$1.71 million. The project will push Intel to deploy more cores and transistors in its high-performance processors while managing the heat generated by future devices, thereby promoting the continuation of Moore's Law.

Tejas Shah, principal engineer and thermal designer of Intel's Supercomputing Platform Group, said: "Simple, sustainable and easy to upgrade features are the reasons why immersion cooling technology is adopted by users. This project will enable the development of two-phase immersion cooling technology, Able to handle the exponential growth in power required by processors over the next decade.”

Data center power consumption accounts for approximately 2% of the total power consumption in the United States, of which data center cooling accounts for 40%. The selected project aims to reduce the energy necessary to cool data centers and reduce the operational carbon footprint associated with this critical infrastructure.

To meet the industry's growing demands for computing power and performance, future data center processors are expected to require more than 2 kilowatts (kW) of power, which is a challenge for existing cooling technologies. Today's most powerful chips use nearly 1 kilowatt of electricity.

The development of cooling solutions will not only further enhance the performance of Intel processors and processors produced by Intel Foundry Services, enabling the continuation of Moore's Law, but will also promote Intel's commitment to energy efficiency and sustainable development.

Intel will work with academic and industry leaders to develop innovative immersion cooling solutions. Intel will be responsible for and overseeing the entire study, providing thermal testing tools for the evaluation and defining the next-generation processor form factors and constraints, including hotspot locations.

Intel's project creates ultra-low thermal resistance coral-shaped submersible liquid-cooling radiators that are integrated into three-dimensional vacuum evaporation chambers to support denser, higher-performance devices. Intel's design will address the challenges of two-phase immersion liquid cooling by optimizing a three-dimensional vacuum evaporation chamber to dissipate heat more efficiently.

Researchers will use 3D printing technology to manufacture this new type of radiator and test the performance of the evaporator in a variety of environments.

The team will combine a new vacuum evaporation chamber vapor chamber design with an innovative boiling enhancement coating to reduce thermal resistance by increasing nucleation site density. Today, these coatings are applied to flat surfaces, but research shows that coral-shaped heat sink designs with internal groove-like features have the highest external heat transfer coefficient potential for two-phase immersion liquid cooling.

The team will determine the best design for the coral-shaped radiator based on computational methods. Today's radiators are usually made of long, parallel threaded strips.

The researchers will apply these innovations to a two-phase immersion cooling system, in which servers operate in a specially designed sealed tank and use a non-conductive liquid medium. The heat generated by the server causes the liquid to boil and produce steam, which then undergoes a phase change back to a liquid state, taking away heat, similar to a home air conditioning system.

The team's goal is to increase the capacity of the entire two-phase immersion cooling system from 0.025°C/W to less than 0.01°C/W , or increase efficiency by a factor of 2.5 or more.