Today 3M announced that the world’s most powerful two-phase immersion cooling project will be deployed in a 40+ MW data center in the Republic of Georgia. Designed and built by the Hong Kong-based engineering company, Allied Control, the 2PIC project will use 3M Novec 7100 Engineered Fluid, an immersion coolant with a low global warming potential. Allied Control is a pioneer in 2PIC, a field showing great promise in boosting data center efficiency.

Allied Control was recently acquired by BitFury Group, a leading Bitcoin Blockchain infrastructure provider and transaction processing company, which builds its own fully custom ASICs, PCBs, servers and data centers. BitFury uses renewable energy for all of its business operations and remains committed to maintaining the smallest carbon footprint possible. BitFury will leverage Allied Control’s award-winning 2PIC technology with Novec fluid in the Georgia data center to deploy 28 nm and 16 nm ASICs more efficiently, saving energy and lowering operational costs while meeting goals of net carbon neutrality.

“With 250 KW per rack and not having reached the limits yet, we now have the ability to grow quickly and spread the cost of the cooling system over many hardware generations,” said Kar-Wing Lau, vice president of operations at Allied Control.”

3M has a long-held leadership position in immersion cooling. Over the past five years, 3M engineered fluids have been used in server cooling in a series of technology demonstrations and a number of increasingly ambitious deployments, which have been recognized by the industry for best in class energy efficiency.

2PIC involves placing hardware in an accessible tank of fluid coolant with a low boiling point, such as Novec 7100 fluid (61°C/142°F). As the hardware heats up in the tank, it boils the Novec fluid, and this change in state pulls the heat away from the components. The Novec fluid becomes a vapor, rises, condenses on a water-cooled condenser coil and falls back into the tank without the use of pumps. The streamlined system can deliver as much as 95 percent cooling energy savings with minimal fluid loss.

The ability to create densely packed circuit boards paired with high-performance during overclocking made 2PIC a natural fit for blockchain transaction processing, an industry with a need for processing power that is growing at unprecedented rates. This growth and progression can provide a roadmap for high performance computing as it evolves toward and beyond exascale.

The PUE we’ve achieved leads us to the next level of data center cooling for high performance computing,” said Valery Vavilov, BitFury CEO. “We’ve taken many steps to optimize our infrastructure for securing the blockchain and blockchain transaction processing that have led us to many different technological innovations. These experiences and technologies could be useful for next generation data center constructions of high performance computing and supercomputing.”

Allied Control designed BitFury’s setup in a matter of months, and at present, the ground-up build is in progress. Phase 1 of this project will include 40MW of IT load running at 1.02 PUE with plans for further expansion in the near future.

3M will demonstrate two-phase cooling with Novec fluid at SC15 booth #2710.

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