Shell Liquid Cooling Fluids: Improving efficiency in high-performance computing
Discover how Shell’s innovative Liquid Cooling Fluids can help data centres and other facilities meet the growing demands of artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing while achieving their operational and environmental goals.
What are liquid cooling fluids?
Liquid cooling fluids are an efficient way to absorb and dissipate the heat generated by electronic components – especially those used in computers and data centre hardware. The fluids are dielectric, which means they do not conduct electricity and do not corrode the equipment, making it safe to submerge electrical equipment in them.
Benefits of Liquid Cooling Fluids
Better performance
By transferring heat more efficiently than many air-cooling techniques (which use refrigerated air, fans and heatsinks), liquid cooling fluids can support overclocking and increase CPU speeds by up to 40%.1
More efficient operations
With no need for coolers, chillers, fans or evaporative cooling systems, liquid cooling fluids can help businesses cut the floor space needed to host their computing equipment by up to 80%.1
Greater energy efficiency
Liquid cooling fluids almost eliminate the need for the power-hungry air conditioning units required by most air-cooling systems, helping to reduce the energy footprint of a computing facility by up to 48.1
Increased profitability
By reducing electricity consumption and the need for intricate heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, liquid cooling fluids can reduce a data centre’s total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 33%.1
Easier to scale
As data centres expand to meet the growing demands of high-end computing, liquid cooling fluids offer an easier way to add scale without the substantial increase in energy consumption and costs of traditional cooling systems.
Improved sustainability
Providing greater operational and energy efficiency, liquid cooling fluids help businesses to achieve their sustainability goals – contributing to CO2 emissions reductions of up to 30%.1
Liquid vs. air cooling
Traditionally, facilities like data centres have relied on air-based cooling systems that require extensive equipment like fans and heatsinks to provide cool air – equipment that reduces operational efficiency through its need for additional space and high energy consumption.
Liquid cooling technology offers a completely different approach. Circulating specially formulated cooling fluids around the equipment, it dissipates heat effectively. This contributes to improved equipment performance through better temperature regulation while providing greater operational and energy efficiency.
Solutions
Direct-to-chip cooling
Often used in data centres to cool high-performance components like central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs), direct-to-chip cooling is as its name suggests. It delivers fluid to a cold plate heat exchanger placed on the component, allowing it to pass directly by the heat source. This makes the extraction of heat more efficient2, helping to handle the heat output of components such as the high-density GPU clusters used in AI systems.
Precision cooling
Precision cooling systems extract heat from specific areas of equipment, making sure critical (and heat-intensive) components get the cooling they need to operate at peak performance. Using a controlled flow of cooling fluid, these systems can maintain a stable temperature for components while reducing the consumption resources like water and energy2 – helping facilities to operate more efficiently and more sustainably2.
Immersion cooling
Full immersion cooling – also known as rack-based immersion cooling – involves immersing elements such as entire servers or networking equipment in non-conductive cooling fluid. The fluid then absorbs and dissipates the heat from all components. This can be effective for the high-density equipment used in data centres and high-performance computing operations and is highly scalable – with the ability to retrofit it within existing infrastructure.
Read whitepaper
What is immersion cooling fluid and why should you pay attention?
Become immersed in the world of liquid cooling, with a whitepaper that explores exactly what liquid cooling is and why it matters.
Covering different techniques and approaches, a detailed look at how it all works and the benefits of using liquid cooling (operational and environmental), it provides a comprehensive look at why businesses should adopt the technology.
Discover more about why liquid cooling offers an effective way to manage the rapidly increasing computing needs of AI and other high-performance computing functions.
Watch videos
What are the key benefits of immersion cooling?
See how Shell is using immersion cooling
Read case study
High-performance computing
Shell Immersion Cooling Fluids enable sustainable data centre upgrade.
What’s new
Working together to lower the carbon footprint of big data
Intel, Submer and Shell are collaborating to advance immersion cooling technology.
Paving the way
Shell IT deploys immersion-cooled HPC cluster within its Houston data center, with help from AMD and Penguin.
Earth Day news from Intel
Intel grants Shell Immersion Cooling Fluids exclusive preliminary certification.
Powering progress together
Shell and Intel team up to boost end customer confidence in immersion cooling with real test results and innovation.
Advancing immersion cooling with our partner Asperitas
Delivering an energy efficient HPC cluster upgrade in Amsterdam.
Future of Sustainable Data Centers
Penguin Solutions, NVIDIA, and Shell Case Study.
Featured collaborations
Submer
Shell has partnered with Submer creating a top-class group of collaborators with extensive reach and resources, working towards more sustainable services.
GRC
GRC Welcomes Shell as First Official Member of ElectroSafe Fluid Partner Program for Data Center Immersion Cooling.
Asperitas
Shell successfully provides an infrastructure upgrade for an energy efficient, scalable and future ready High Performance Computing (HPC)cluster in a T-Systems managed Amsterdam datacentre.
DUG Cool
Shell fluids are helping DUG deliver future-proof industrial immersion cooling solutions, at any scale. Solving the cooling challenges of modern, power-hungry CPUs and GPUs efficiently.
Disclaimers:
1 Figures based on: Global immersion cooling market in data centres – growth, trends and forecast (2019–2024) report (Mordor Intelligence) and Shell’s internal evaluations. Benefits achieved will vary according to actual site development.
2 Than conventional methods such as coolers, chillers evaporative coolers, fans and bearing.
