VAPOR-COMPRESSION-REFRIGERATOR ENABLED THERMAL MANAGEMENT OF HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTER

With rapid upgrade of high performance computer, heat release from chips is increasing at a tremendous rate. Particularly, the emergence of the technology by integrating multiple CPU into a computer closet makes it more serious for the thermal management. Traditional air cooling, even liquid cooling may not be able to fulfill this urgent need. Therefore, active refrigeration is becoming an important option to solve such bottleneck problem. As a mature refrigerating method with high cooling capacity, high efficiency and low cost, vapor compression refrigerator appears as an excellent candidate in the computer industry. However, at the present stage, a reliable and integrated equipment is still not available. Here to tackle the high flux heating issue, we propose a vapor compression system for simultaneously managing heat released from multiple computer chips. The system is quite flexible when connected with four-CPU-chip. Besides, it allows use a completely close computer closet, which will thus have unique merits such as dustproof, low noise and long life-span etc. To evaluate the cooling capacity of the present refrigeration system, several conceptual thermal management experiments on high performance computer was performed. It was shown that temperatures for the first three chips near the refrigerant inlet can be reduced to about 20℃ from 80℃ in a high thermal load 180W. This study demonstrates that introduction of the integrated vapor compression cooling system may change the structure and working manner of a computer. It is very possible to become a competitive thermal management option in future high performance personal computer.