The Study on cold plate liquid cooling solution for high performance server

IT equipment power is increasing rapidly to meet the continuously increased demand of computing performance. Intel Next generation CPU-Granite Rapids will reach maximum 500W Thermal Design Power (TDP) and AMD Turin CPU will have maximum TDP more than 600W. Traditional air cooling has great thermal challenge especially for high density servers. And liquid cooling provides more superior and efficient cooling to meet thermal requirements for future IT equipment and decrease data center power usage effectiveness (PUE). This paper introduced the engineering practice of cold plate liquid cooling solutions for dual latest generation 350W Intel Sapphire Rapids CPU and DDR5 DIMMs in 1U and half-width node of server. Two liquid cooling solutions were designed with different CPU cold plate designs, similar DIMM cold plate design along with different hose routings. Experiments on thermal performance of CPU cold plates, DIMM cold plates associated with the node level liquid cooling solutions were conducted to study the impact on thermal performance in terms of coolant inlet temperature, coolant flow rate, air cooling fan speed, etc. Furthermore, thermal simulation analysis using Simcenter Flotherm for liquid cooling solution was conducted, and simulation results have good agreement with the experimental results, the thermal resistance error was within 5%, the pressure drop error was within 10% and it can be used as reference of cold plate liquid cooling design and simulation.