In our recent blog, Manufacturing Digitization at the Edge Has Challenges, Liquid Cooling Enables the Industrial Edge, we covered the growth of the edge computing market and what makes liquid cooling so attractive for the edge. In this blog, we’ll explain why modular solutions make edge computing even more attractive and affordable when liquid immersion cooling is deployed.
For comparison, let’s look at two different modular unit designs. The first is outfitted with traditional air cooling infrastructure. Air cooling equipment typically takes up 30 to 50% of the usable space in the compute module and nominally tops out at around 500kW of useable IT load. The second unit uses liquid immersion cooling – for example our turnkey MacroModular™ – and requires very little cooling equipment space due to the ability for 2-phase immersion cooling to deliver far higher capacity for heat rejection versus air cooling: in this case providing a 3X power gain in the same footprint.
| % of Space Required | Max Cooling Power | Power Gain | |
| Traditional Air Cooling | 30-50% | 500kW | – |
| Liquid Cooling using MacroModular | 10% | 1.5MW | 3X |
Power is just part of the story
MacroModular offers many advantages of liquid immersion cooling over air cooling. These include high energy efficiency and dramatic reductions in water use and space that lead to significant TCO savings and increased sustainability.
MacroModular
Can achieve up to:
- 41% reduction in energy used for cooling
- 48% CAPEX reduction versus air-cooling
- 69% reduction in Data Center white space
- 28% improvement in TCO over 20 years (nominal)
With LiquidStack MacroModular, businesses can rapidly deploy high performance computing at the regional edge to run diverse IT and multiple workloads, including AI. Deployments can be in a permanent or semi-permanent location, and to support a broad range of needs. Applications can range from colocation, telecommunications, high-performance computing, and hybrid cloud to enterprise and cryptocurrency mining. MacroModular can also be used to rapidly and cost-effectively retrofit existing data center infrastructure in a fraction of the time that bricks and mortar redesigns take.
Small is beautiful, and powerful
Modular edge use-cases can benefit from liquid cooling in even smaller form factors. The new LiquidStack MicroModular™ is designed for demanding local edge applications across a wide range of businesses, use-cases and sites where local compute is needed.
MicroModular enables businesses to rapidly deploy high performance computing for use cases such as AI, OTT, advanced cloud computing and any other low latency workload. Deployable in restricted spaces and any type of environment, including harsh conditions, this modular solution uses significantly less energy, zero water, and provides up to 250kW of compute power. Like its big brother, MacroModular, MicroModular improves energy efficiency and drastically cuts water and space requirements, leading to significant TCO savings and increased sustainability.
MicroModular
Can achieve up to:
- 41% reduction in energy used for cooling
- 44% CAPEX reduction versus air-cooling
- 61% reduction in Data Center white space
- 22% improvement in TCO over 20 years (nominal)
Modular and liquid cooling are the solution
Both MicroModular and MacroModular provide businesses with turnkey, liquid cooled solutions, making them the fastest and most reliable way to adopt and capture liquid cooling and its benefits – without disrupting existing IT operations. Their compact size and immense capability to reject heat from hi-flux microprocessors provides 250kW to 1.5MW of compute cooling within a single prefabricated module, and up to Tier III redundancy to ensure high resiliency and concurrent maintainability.
The unmatched efficiency of liquid immersion cooling enables MicroModular and MacroModular to support increased power densities at an industry leading PUE of 1.02 and the potential for zero water usage. Both allow customer-specific standard configurations, resulting in consistent global coverage in even the harshest and hottest conditions. The outside heat rejection components for both solutions were designed in collaboration with Trane Technologies™ and also seamlessly integrate with Trane® heat reuse technology. Along with heat reuse, MicroModular and MacroModular enable a range of sustainability options including microgrid technologies. For more information about LiquidStack Modular edge computing solutions, please contact LiquidStack.