Immersion cooling reaches new heights: 250 kW per bitFury rack

BitFury company brings cooling by immersion to a new stage of development: the management announced its intention to build a new cryptocurrency mining farm with a capacity of about 40 MW. In this case, one rack will account for about 250 kW. To achieve these goals, BitFury plans to use equipment from 3M .

The new facility will be the largest in the world where immersion cooling is used. The main goal is to increase the density of equipment placement. The farm will be optimized to work with immersion cooling technology, there will not be many infrastructure elements typical of traditional data centers. Very high density of equipment placement and high efficiency of this equipment are critical for crypto-mining farms.
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Trying to find new ways to increase the efficiency of the equipment, BitFury bought Allied Control, specializing in two-phase immersion cooling (2PIC), using a refrigerant from 3M.

“The density of 250 kW per rack is not the limit, and now we have the opportunity to quickly grow, effectively using a new type of cooling system,” said a company representative.

All this works according to a well-known principle: as soon as the equipment is heated to a certain temperature, the liquid boils, diverting excess thermal energy, turning into steam. Next, the steam condenses, flowing back into the tank.



This type of system is extremely effective; Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is about 1.02 here. All this is possible due to the fact that there is no need to use the infrastructure for cooling with air, with raised floors and other elements of this infrastructure.


Moving from a liquid phase to a gaseous one, the refrigerant from 3M removes thermal energy from the equipment.
Interestingly, now the average load on the rack in most data centers is about 5 kW, with an increase to 8-10 kW on server farms of a certain type.

Immersion immersion can find wider application in highly loaded systems. So, now the US government is looking for an opportunity to increase the performance of supercomputers. At the latest SC14 conference, experts predicted the rapid expansion of immersion cooling technology.

Rethinking the concept of data center cooling

Cooling of data center equipment is a key task, or rather, one of the key ones. Usually, an air cooling system with hot / cold corridors using water cooling circuits enclosed in air purification systems and CRACs located around the hall is used for this purpose.

Alternative - liquid cooling, either with the use of fluid, enclosed in pipelines, and supplied to places where cooling is required, or with direct immersion of servers in liquid. Some equipment manufacturers integrate water cooling systems directly into servers or racks.

Immersion cooling is now used in various fields, this technology works in scientific data centers, seismic modeling systems, military computers. And this trend is not accidental. According to representatives of the same 3M company, immersion cooling can reduce operating costs by 95%.

Bitcoin farms are an ideal area for immersion diving. The creators of such farms require maximum equipment density with maximum performance. The higher the performance of the equipment - the greater the profit of the farm. And the margin is now less and less, because for a couple of years Bitcoin fell against the dollar from $ 1,100 to $ 295.

Many farms simply closed, or changed the pricing policy for the client. Many Chinese mining farms and mining equipment manufacturers like BitFury have survived. Last year, this company received about $ 20 million for capacity expansion, and now the company plans to open new data centers in Finland, Iceland, Georgia.

Scaling technology

As mentioned above, the power of the new mining farm from BitFury will reach 40 MW. Developers will load about 160 racks with a planned load of 250 kW per each rack into a liquid from 3M.

“PUE, which we managed to achieve, brings cooling to data centers to a new level,” said Valery Vavilov, CEO of BitFury. According to Vavilov, the company is taking quite active steps to optimize the cooling infrastructure of its data centers. This experience, the head of the company believes, can be useful in terms of creating a new generation of data centers with enhanced performance.

In addition to improving the performance of the equipment, immersion cooling also significantly reduces the cost of infrastructure data center, eliminating the need to create raised floors, air-cooling systems, installation of water circuits. There is also no need to use coolers, which are usually quite a lot in mining equipment.

Submersible cooling containers allow you to quickly replace iron - both individual components and entire racks. BitFury often has to do this with its ASIC.