The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced a funding of $42 million for overcoming the technology barriers in the development of high-performance energy-efficient cooling solutions for data centers. Data centers account for almost 2% of total U.S. electricity production. However, data center cooling can account for up to 40% of overall data center energy usage.
The DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) is expected to fund projects seeking to reduce how much energy is used to cool data centers. This will help reduce the carbon footprint of data centers. This will support President Biden’s goals to have a net zero carbon emissions economy in the US by 2050.
“Extreme weather events, like the soaring temperatures much of the country experienced this summer, also impact data centers which connect critical computing and network infrastructure and must be kept at certain temperatures to remain operational,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “Creating solutions to cool data centers efficiently and reduce the associated carbon emissions supports the technological breakthroughs needed to fight climate change and secure our clean energy future.”
The ARPA-E funding program
ARPA-E’s COOLERCHIPS (Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliable and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems) funding program will develop a new cooling system that is efficient and reliable. This will help create a new class of power-dense computational systems, data centers, and modular systems. The program prioritizes four technical categories for cooling system innovation opportunities. These are:
- Energy-efficient cooling solutions that are required for the next generation high power density servers.
- High power density modular data centers that can be operated efficiently from any location.
- Software and modeling tool development to design and optimize data centers’ energy use, CO2 footprint, reliability, and cost at the same time.
- Facilities and best practices that enable efficient evaluation and demonstration of transformational technologies which are developed under the program.
The COOLERCHIPS program enables the development of novel high-performance, high-reliability cooling systems for compute electronics. The cooling system will allow a new class of power-dense computational systems, data centers, and modular EDGE systems. The system will use 5% or less of the IT load at any location in the US at any time of the year. The COOLERCHIPS program will also support the use of recent advances in thermal management, coolant flow technology, materials, manufacturing, design, controls, and reliability engineering.
Interested operators can submit the concept paper by October 26, 2022. However, the full application submission deadline is yet to be decided.
It is expected from the proposing teams to have expertise in relevant compute servers, heat transfer, reliability, modeling, data center techno-economics, data center operation, and commercialization.
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