Laser Cooling Breakthrough Could Make Data Centers Much More Sustainable

Although people usually associate lasers with heating — quickly, precisely, and from a distance — researchers can also use them to cool things down under certain conditions.That function might be key to solving the overheating issues in data centers.

Innovative Partnership for Thermal Solutions

Sandia Labs, a U.S. government-funded research center, is teaming up with Minneapolis-based startup Maxwell Labs to develop a technology that uses lasers to cool down hotspots on the chips powering data centers.

Researchers have previously applied laser cooling in experiments with antimatter, biological research, and the study of quantum phenomena. Now, alongside researchers from the University of New Mexico, the team is working on a new approach known as laser-based photonic cooling.

The main goal is to cut down the massive energy consumption needed to keep servers and high-performance computers cool. Currently, around 30% to 40% of a data center’s energy use goes into cooling alone, making operations costly and putting a strain on local resources.

Besides improving energy efficiency, a more effective cooling system can also enhance chip performance by preventing thermal throttling — a slowdown caused by excessive heat.

So how does this work? Lasers tuned to a specific frequency can be aimed at microscopic areas on the surface of certain materials, and instead of heating them, they cool them down. These targeted areas are incredibly small — only a few hundred microns in size.

A New Approach to Chip Cooling

Engineers typically cool today’s data center chips by running cold water through microchannels in copper plates mounted above the processors.The scientists propose a completely different method: developing a photonic cold plate with ultra-tiny structures — about a thousand times thinner than a human hair — to channel laser light directly to the chips’ hotspots.

The researchers will primarily make this cold plate from gallium arsenide, a semiconductor material.For it to work effectively, it needs to be less than a millimeter thick and nearly free of impurities. Maxwell Labs believes this approach could outperform current water-based systems and may either replace or complement them.

With more efficiently cooled chips, data centers could become less energy-hungry while also enabling more powerful computing systems. As Maxwell Labs CEO Jacob Balma explained: The unique ability of light to control localized heating both spatially and on optical timescales breaks thermal design limitations that are so fundamental to chip design, it’s hard to predict what hardware architects will do with it — but I’m confident it will fundamentally change the kinds of problems we can solve with computers.

Read the original article on: New Atlas

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