Bitcoin mining, by design, is increasing in difficulty. Enthusiasts mining in their basements have given way to professionally managed cloud services that deploy equipment on a massive scale. Growing energy requirements and rapidly evolving hardware are testing the limits of traditional infrastructure. GRC’s oil immersion cooling technology promises to boost efficiency while making infrastructure extremely flexible, quick to deploy, and easy to scale.
http://www.grcooling.com/bitcoin-mining/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5zoIEjo1Zk
what do you think?
I like many have been following the changes in cooling techniques offered by datacenters for consumer and commercial miners. Sometime ago I was discussing a similar oil immersion cooling option from Gray Matter Industries and NextFort. I'm not sure if they ever proceeded with the plan but I suspect they were utilizing the same GRC product or similar.
ASICMiner already had a liquid cooling setup, BitFury straight-out acquired Allied Control, and if you search these forums for 'novec', you'll find all sorts of outfits trying out 3M's liquid for cooling Bitcoin mining rigs.
Moving miners to colder climates to begin with seems a more workable solution for now
Moving to colder climates is definitely a workable solution: KNC, BitFury, PeerNova and DigitalBTC would all agree given their primary operations are in the Arctic Circle. However for the small medium business mining operator that doesn't have the resources to orchestrate an overseas enterprise, immersion cooling is definitely an appropriate move. Taking ASICMiner as the example mentioned, they recognised the potential of 2 phase immersion cooling while they were still experimenting with FGPA clusters. It should very interesting too see how BitFury scales up Allied Control and the 2 phase immersion cooling configurations.
I don't see immersion cooling as the next big thing for miners.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZavKweMrP4
My BTC isn't Immersion cooled but in the mid 2000's I had a Performance PC I did with submersion Cooling, lets just say its a pain in the ass, and its not worth the troubles, unless; the item was designed for immersion, or you're using a designed liquid.
The Hardest part after that is the added weight to a rig/set up/rack, a 42U rack sitting has weight around 3000lbs, I know a standard rack is basically a 265gal tank, that would be adding roughly 2200lbs, so that rack would now weight roughly 2.5tons....... you also need enough "coolant" to move and pumps/circulation to move all that, and on top of that with that much heat you need a heat exchange to dump that heat elsewhere or a chiller.....