Air Cooling Server Conversion to Two Phase Immersion Cooling and Thermal Performance Results

The Thermal Design Power (TDP) in microelectronics as well as the power density in servers, have become substantially high for traditional air cooling, especially those designed for high performance computing. Therefore, other alternative cooling technologies with higher cooling capacity, such as liquid cooling, are being currently developed and implemented. Among these novel liquid cooling technologies, immersion cooling is gaining a lot of interest as a potential heat transfer mechanism in electronics due to its enhanced thermal performance, energy efficiency, and the potential to sustain higher hardware densities. This paper presents the characteristics of an spread core type server, with two CPU sockets and 24 DIMM DDR4 modules that has been reworked to be used in a two-phase immersion cooling environment. The considerations necessary for the successful deployment of such platforms are introduced, and thermal performance of the components is evaluated as a reference for future immersion cooling developments.