( 01st July 2019 )
I am designing mining farm and its air cooling flow, recently. Including mining RIGs, its heat air management is main topics of challenging matter.
Various methods have been devised to improve the efficiency of cooling in the mining factory.
For example, one method is "floor blowout" that sends cold air from the floor to the server rack. Because warm air has a low specific gravity, it tends to move upwards than cold air with a high specific gravity. Floor blowing is a cooling method that utilizes this nature of air.
Cold air is sent from under the floor for each server rack to remove the heat of RIG equipment. The heat becomes hot air and is carried to the ceiling surface by the updraft, so it sucks the hot air there.
In traditional medium-sized mining factories, this method has not been a big problem. However, in recent years, mining factories tend to be large in order to handle large amounts of blockchain traffic. Adopting a floor blowing method in such facilities is becoming more difficult in terms of construction costs, etc.
As far as the nature of air is concerned, “air flow improvement” is also essential to cope with the densification of the entire mining factory.
The RIG device basically sucks in cold air from the front to cool it, and exhausts the warm air from the rear. If you do not understand that, the warm exhaust of the ICT equipment installed in the front will be drawn in by the ICT equipment in the rear, and the cooling in the rear will not progress at all.
So, we set up so that the front and back of ICT equipment installed in RIG rack face each other. Furthermore, efficient cooling can be achieved by enclosing the areas where cold air and waste heat are flowing, respectively, so that the air does not mix.
Local approaches such as the heat pool generated around the RIG rack require another approach. The centralized cooling system sends air cooled by a central machine to each unit installed in the mining factory, but the air is warmed up during that time. In order to solve this, there is also a method called “distributed management” in which a cooling system is installed beside a high heat RIG rack.
With the advent of large-scale mining factories, the cooling method is shifting to smarter.
With the advent of the digital transformation era, mining factories are becoming larger than before.
The larger the mining factory, the more difficult it is to cool efficiently in an air-cooled air conditioner. Among them, the water cooling type with high cooling efficiency is to be reviewed.
Water-cooled air conditioners have been temporarily avoided due to water leaks, etc. In recent years, the appearance of new water-cooled air conditioners, which use the heat of vaporization by water spray to the outside air and heat exchangers, has become a tailwind.
The evolution of cooling methods in mining factories is ongoing.
In the former mining factory, the operation of RIG equipment and facilities such as power supply and air conditioning have been optimally maintained and operated respectively. In recent years, efforts have been made to use the AI technology there to optimize the whole.
Furthermore, instead of just dumping the waste heat from the mining factory, attempts have been launched overseas to help heat other buildings. There are cases in Japan where waste heat from mining factories is used for greenhouse cultivation, and attempts are being made to return some of the energy consumed by mining factories to society.
Example of module type mining rack
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