Impossible Trinity: The Trilemma of Crypto Mining Data Center

 Impossible trinity is a concept in international economics which states that it is impossible to have all three advantages at the same time. Similarly, the trilemma per se can be applied to many cases, and so to crypto mining data centers. Generally, data centers that using traditional air-cooling solution are having difficulty reaching high performance, low energy consumption and cost efficiency at the same time.

Rapid development of AI industry and fast increase in the use of high-performance chips, as well as the continuous expansion of memory capacity, leading heat dissipation and energy consumption problems in mining data centers more prominent. Additionally, enterprises that share values of reducing carbon footprints, sustainability and devoted in creating a better future on earth would also prefer data centers with lower PUE, the transition to green and low-carbon is imminent.

Currently, the traditional air-cooling solution is reaching its limitation, liquid cooling with low energy consumption of water, high space utilization, high maintainability characteristics, is gradually becoming new cooling solution for mining data center. According to recent IDC research, cooling device is needed inside data centers, mostly from machines generating heat, including computing, storage, and network appliances.

In terms of hashing power, energy consumption of enterprise miner is constantly rising, and the current “CPU + GPU” deployment model resulting higher density properties than previous architectures, the demand for liquid cooling is extremely high. As of storage, memory accounted for more than 35% of total energy consumption, second only to mining machine, and has great potential needs in liquid cooling. For network appliances, liquid cooling switches will be effective in heat dissipation, and enhance transmission efficiency.

The ultimate energy efficiency of full-stack liquid cooling data centers fits the development trend of high hashrate, storage, and network infrastructures, and has become the optimal solution to break the ice under the development trend of low energy consumption in data centers.

The trend of full-stack liquid cooling data centers is inevitable. Research points out that the data storage in mining data center is rapidly increasing. Statistics show that by the end of June 2023, the total volume of storage in China reached 1080EB, and the energy consumption of storage continues to increase.

Technically, liquid cooling solution improves and renovate current storage architecture and technology to provide liquid-cooled storage solutions to optimize storage performance, ensure the stability of storage, and achieve high-speed growth in storage capacity.

In this regard, it is necessary to consider security, efficiency, cost, environmental protection, and such, which involves not only the innovation of hardware, but also the adaptation and optimization of the software system. High-performance sealing materials, reliable connection, excellent cooling design, efficient cooling circulation system, system integration capabilities, intelligent analysis support, adequate security and environmental adaptability are indispensable. FBox

In practice, the research and development and application of liquid cooling technology is still improving, and in terms of improve storage performance, resource utilization, reduce energy consumption, FBox developed its very own chip and managing system both on hardware and software, ensure the whole cooling process is efficient and evolving over time.

At present, although the outbreak of AI promotes the deployment of liquid cooling solutions, liquid cooling in large-scale server are still developing. In this regard, this trilemma of technology, ecology and business requires liquid cooling solution can still use some boosts from market.

The construction of full-stack liquid-cooling data center is a crucial step in future. FBox’s immersion liquid cooling solution addresses all these concerns, thus for mining data centers, immersion cooling soon emerged as the only practical way forward.