Putting the Cool Factor Back into Oil

Viridien reaps the benefits of its early adoption of oil immersion technology for its high-performance computing (HPC) data centers

With industry and businesses requiring ever greater compute capacity, HPC data centers face the triple challenge of rising power costs, increasingly dense servers, and the growing need to reduce energy usage to limit their carbon footprint. 

To keep pace with ongoing HPC developments, a key requirement will be the ability to cool the next generation of ultra-dense and hot HPC systems. While conventional cooling methods, such as air, have reached their limits for industrial deployment, the adoption of liquid immersion technology, such as mineral oil, is now accelerating as a powerful, cost-effective and sustainable solution to cool the densest computing systems. 

Viridien has already gained a considerable head-start in the deployment of oil cooling at its Houston HPC data center, where geophysicists apply their high-end imaging technologies to deliver stunning and highly precise 3D images of the Earth’s subsurface to their clients. 

As Jean-Yves Blanc, IT Chief Architect, explains: “Historically, Viridien has always been an early adopter of cutting-edge advances in industrial HPC architectures. We started looking at cooling servers in oil back in 2009 and, after overcoming our initial reservations, quickly came to see the advantages this solution could offer over air cooling.” 

As with any new technology it adopts, the Viridien team put oil cooling through its paces during a testing phase before validating the solution for its data centers. After the usual learning curve, the solution was deployed for 24/7 production in Houston, its largest HPC data hub. 

“Very quickly, we were able to capitalize on the significant energy savings we were making with oil cooling systems to expand our compute capacity,” said Laurent Clerc, VP, HPC & Digital Platform. “This meant we could run the increasingly sophisticated imaging algorithms our geophysicists were developing to meet the complex geological challenges our clients were facing in hotspot areas such as the Gulf of Mexico.” 

For Jean-Yves, the energy efficiency of oil cooling doesn’t only have a positive impact from a cost perspective, it also positions this technology at the top of green IT initiatives in HPC. “Oil immersion is also an attractive option for reducing the environmental impact of data centers, as it ensures most of the energy is used by the IT equipment. In addition, unlike in air-cooled data centers, the systems are very quiet, making our data centers a much more pleasant and safer environment for our people to work in.” 

Although it started out alone, Viridien has tried along the way to get other parties interested in using or supporting this significant technological differentiator, recognizing that there needs to be an established ecosystem for the oil immersion technology to thrive.

Fortunately, the ecosystem is now much richer than a decade ago with about a dozen oil immersion cooling system vendors, and many HPC users and hyperscalers adopting oil immersion. The ecosystem of server vendors, a key driver behind the broad adoption of oil immersion cooling, is also currently growing. 

According to Laurent: “Viridien is — by far — the industrial player with the longest and largest experience in oil immersion cooling. After seeing its value in what has turned out to be a long-term solution for us over the last decade, we believe that this solution is the only valid path forward for simple, stable, safe and efficient operations using ultra-dense and hot HPC systems.” 

Leveraging its unique experience in oil cooling, Viridien is actively collaborating with server vendors and some key component providers to prepare for the release of even higher-density HPC systems and turn oil immersion into a more mainstream approach in the HPC world. With this strategy, Viridien believes it is extremely well-positioned for the future. 

To find out more about Viridien’s deployment of oil immersion cooling technology, read the full version of an article by Laurent and Jean-Yves, originally published in First Break, Volume 39, Issue 12, December 2021, here.