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    Cool It: Team Tackles the Thermal Challenge Data Centers Face

    in PC Hardware

    Posted

    Two years after he spoke at a conference detailing his ambitious vision for cooling tomorrow’s data centers, Ali Heydari and his team won a $5 million grant to go build it.

    It was the largest of 15 awards in May from the U.S. Department of Energy. The DoE program, called COOLERCHIPS, received more than 100 applications from a who’s who list of computer architects and researchers.

    “This is another example of how we’re rearchitecting the data center,” 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.

    “We celebrated on Slack because the team is all over the U.S.,” said Jeremy Rodriguez, who once built hyperscale liquid-cooling systems and now manages NVIDIA’s data center engineering team.

    A Historic Shift

    The project is ambitious and comes at a critical moment in the history of computing.

    Processors are expected to generate up to an order of magnitude more heat as Moore’s law hits the limits of physics, but the demands on data centers continue to soar.

    Soon, today’s air-cooled systems won’t be able to keep up. Current liquid-cooling techniques won’t be able to handle the more than 40 watts per square centimeter researchers expect future silicon in data centers will need to dissipate.

    So, Heydari’s group defined an advanced liquid-cooling system.

    Their approach promises to cool a data center packed into a mobile container, even when it’s placed in an environment up to 40 degrees Celsius and is drawing 200kW — 25x the power of today’s server racks.

    It will cost at least 5% less and run 20% more efficiently than today’s air-cooled approaches. It’s much quieter and has a smaller carbon footprint, too.

    “That’s a great achievement for our engineers who are very smart folks,” he said, noting part of their mission is to make people aware of the changes ahead.

    A Radical Proposal

    The team’s solution combines two technologies never before deployed in tandem.

    First, chips will be cooled with cold plates whose coolant evaporates like sweat on the foreheads of hard-working processors, then cools to condense and re-form as liquid. Second, entire servers, with their lower power components, will be encased in hermetically sealed containers and immersed in coolant.

    Diagram of NVIDIA's liquid cooling design for data centersNovel solution: Servers will be bathed in coolants as part of the project.

    They will use a liquid common in refrigerators and car air conditioners, but not yet used in data centers.

    Three Giant Steps

    The three-year project sets annual milestones — component tests next year, a partial rack test a year later, and a full system tested and delivered at the end.

    Icing the cake, the team will create a full digital twin of the system using NVIDIA Omniverse, an open development platform for building and operating metaverse applications.

    The NVIDIA team consists of about a dozen thermal, power, mechanical and systems engineers, some dedicated to creating the digital twin. They have help from seven partners:

    • Binghamton and Villanova universities in analysis, testing and simulation
    • BOYD Corp. for the cold plates
    • Durbin Group for the pumping system
    • Honeywell to help select the refrigerant
    • Sandia National Laboratory in reliability assessment, and
    • Vertiv Corp. in heat rejection

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

    Of course, it’s hard work, too.

    For instance, Mohammed Tradat, a former Binghamton researcher who now heads an NVIDIA data center mechanical engineering group, “had a sleepless night working on the grant application, but it’s a labor of love for all of us,” he said.

    Heydari said he never imagined the team would be bringing its ideas to life when he delivered a talk on them in late 2021.

    “No other company would allow us to build an organization that could do this kind of work — we’re making history and that’s amazing,” said Rodriguez.

    See how digital twins, built in Omniverse, help optimize the design of a data center in the video below.

    Picture at top: Gathered recently at NVIDIA headquarters are (from left) Scott Wallace (NVIDIA), Greg Strover (Vertiv), Vivien Lecoustre (DoE), Vladimir Troy (NVIDIA), Peter Debock (COOLERCHIPS program director), Rakesh Radhakrishnan (DoE), Joseph Marsala (Durbin Group), Nigel Gore (Vertiv), and Jeremy Rodriguez, Bahareh Eslami, Manthos Economou, Harold Miyamura and Ali Heydari (all of NVIDIA).

    View the full article

    Butterfly Effects: Digital Artist Uses AI to Engage Exhibit Goers

    in PC Hardware

    Posted

    For about six years, AI has been an integral part of the artwork of Dominic Harris, a London-based digital artist who’s about to launch his biggest exhibition to date.

    “I use it for things like giving butterflies a natural sense of movement,” said Harris, whose typical canvas is an interactive computer display.

    Using a rack of NVIDIA’s latest GPUs in his studio, Harris works with his team of more than 20 designers, developers and other specialists to create artworks like Unseen. It renders a real-time collage of 13,000 butterflies — some fanciful, each unique, but none real. Exhibit-goers can make them flutter or change color with a gesture.

    Unseen, AI-inspired artwork by Dominic harrisThe Unseen exhibit includes a library of 13,000 digital butterflies.

    The work attracted experts from natural history museums worldwide. Many were fascinated by the way it helps people appreciate the beauty and fragility of nature by inviting them to interact with creatures not yet discovered or yet to be born.

    “AI is a tool in my palette that supports the ways I try to create a poignant human connection,” he said.

    An Artist’s View of AI

    Harris welcomes the public fascination with generative AI that sprang up in the past year, though it took him by surprise.

    “It’s funny that AI in art has become such a huge topic because, even a year ago, if I told someone there’s AI in my art, they would’ve had a blank face,” he said.

    Looking forward, AI will assist, not replace, creative people, Harris said.

    “With each performance increase from NVIDIA’s products, I’m able to augment what I can express in a way that lets me create increasingly incredible original artworks,” he said.

    A Living Stock Exchange

    Combining touchscreens, cameras and other sensors, he aims to create connections between his artwork and people who view and interact with them.

    For instance, Limitless creates an eight-foot interactive tower made up of gold blocks animated by a live data feed from the London Stock Exchange. Each block represents a company, shining or tarnished, by its current rising or falling valuation. Touching a tile reveals the face of the company’s CEO, a reminder that human beings drive the economy.

    Limitless, an AI-inspired artwork by Dominic HarrisHarris with “Limitless,” a living artwork animated in part with financial market data.

    It’s one work in Feeding Consciousness, Harris’ largest exhibition to date, opening Thursday, May 25, at London’s Halcyon Gallery.

    Booting Up Invitations

    “Before the show even opened, it got extended,” he said, showing invitations that went out on small tablets loaded with video previews.

    The NVIDIA Jetson platform for edge AI and robotics “features prominently in the event and has become a bit of a workhorse for me in many of my artworks,” he said.

    An immersive space in the "Feeding Consciousness" exhibition by Dominic HarrisAn immersive space in the “Feeding Consciousness” exhibit relies on NVIDIA’s state-of-the-art graphics.

    Three years in the making, the new exhibit includes one work that uses 180 displays. It also sports an immersive space created with eight cameras, four laser rangefinders and four 4K video projectors.

    “I like building unique canvases to tell stories,” he said.

    Endurace, a digital artwork by Dominic HarrisHarris puts the viewer in control of Antarctic landscapes in “Endurance.”

    For example, Endurance depicts polar scenes Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition trekked through when their ship got trapped in the ice pack off Antarctica in 1915. All 28 men survived, and the sunken ship was discovered last year while Harris was working on his piece.

    Harris and one of his artworks made using technologies from NVIDIAHarris encounters a baby polar bear from an artwork.

    “I was inspired by men who must have felt miniscule before the forces of nature, and the role reversal, 110 years later, now that we know how fragile these environments really are,” he said.

    Writing Software at Six

    Harris started coding at age six. When his final project in architecture school — an immersive installation with virtual sound — won awards at University College London, it set the stage for his career as a digital artist.

    Along the way, “NVIDIA was a name I grew up with, and graphics cards became a part of my palette that I’ve come to lean on more and more — I use a phenomenal amount of processing power rendering some of  my works,” he said.

    For example, next month he’ll install Every Wing Has a Silver Lining, a 16-meter-long work that displays 30,000 x 2,000 pixels, created in part with GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs.

    “We use the highest-end hardware to achieve an unbelievable level of detail,” he said.

    He shares his passion in school programs, giving children a template which they can use to draw butterflies that he later brings to life on a website.

    “It’s a way to get them to see and embrace art in the technology they’re growing up with,” he said, comparing it to NVIDIA Canvas, a digital drawing tool his six- and 12-year-old daughters love to use.

    The Feeding Consciousness exhibition, previewed in the video below, runs from May 25 to August 13 at London’s Halcyon Gallery.

     

    View the full article

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