Quote from: tytus on July 13, 2013, 04:22:23 PM

So its $1k to cool this container. Sinks and fans will be cheaper. What is the business model for the fluid ?

The goal isn't to fill the container and for it to be economical you are going to want to stack the head loads very tightly.

Most engineered fluids are ~$50 per Liter. 1L = 1000 cm3. So we are talking $0.05 per cm3.

Now imagine you have a KNC board you wish to cool. This isn't a recommendation however it is the type of board that would be a good fit because it has a high energy density.
The board is roughly 15cm x 15cm. Now put the board on its side and put a 1 cm spacer between it and the next board. Do that for 10 boards. You end up with a cube roughly 15cmx15cmx15cm. The fluid would fill the space between the boards a rectangle roughly 1cm x 15 cm x 15cm. So there will be 225cm3 of fluid between the boards. It is actually less because the surface mount component will displace some of the fluid. 225 cm * $0.05 = $11.25 per board. Now that is just the cooling fluid you will need condenser and if the condenser is water cooled, pumps, tubing, and either a chiller or dry tower.

However this simplistic example should show how while the cost per gallon is high the goal is to use as little as possible. It also allows incredible energy densities. In the example above 10 boards (1,000 GH/s) occupy a space of 3375 cm3 or 3.4 cm3 per GH/s. Now you still need space for the vapor height and the condenser so lets triple that to roughly 10cm3 per GH/s.

You could never air cool KNC boards with only 1cm on clearance between boards. KNC stock design is for 4 boards (400 GH/s) in a 4U rackmount space. So roughly 100 GH/s per 1U. A datacenter rackunit is 19" x 24" x 1.75" = 798 cubic inches. To use the same units that is ~13,000 cm3 or 130 cm3.

10 cm3 vs 130 cm3. A 13x improvement in density. While you wouldn't need to rackmount these you could fit about 50 TH/s of KNC gear (90KW) in the same space as a datacenter rack. If Cointerra or HF can deliver 4x the efficiency it would be more like 200 TH/s per datacenter rack.