What do data centres and high-performance vehicles have in common?
At first glance data centres and high-performance vehicles have little in common. One is designed to travel at incredible speeds, while the other is designed to process vast amounts of data. But they share a fundamental challenge: managing heat.
Performance isn’t just about power
For years, high-performance industries from motorsport to aerospace, have understood that success depends on how effectively you manage the thermal systems.
The same demanding requirements are now emerging in data centres.
For AI data centres, thermal management is becoming critical to the adoption of the latest GPUs. Power-dense, liquid-cooled racks are becoming the norm – requiring precise, fast-responding control systems with advanced filtration and monitoring. These decisions now play a pivotal role in optimising capital investment to meet ever-increasing targets for uptime, emissions and water consumption. It is no longer solely about compute capacity.
The new constraint isn't just compute
It’s managing the energy and heat that come with it. Reliable, resilient cooling and power supply systems are vying with compute hardware as the most critical infrastructure investments. So how do you integrate the provision and management of cooling, power, water, and compute loads into a high-performance system so it can scale efficiently when needed?
For decades, Ricardo has helped customers solve complex engineering challenges – balancing the competing demands of reliability and performance with efficiency and environmental impact. The best solutions have come from breaking traditional boundaries, applying innovative thinking and drawing on insights from diverse industries and technologies.
Through our rigorous systems engineering and advanced analytical and simulation tools, we help our customers turn complex energy systems concepts into real-world solutions.
What can the data centre sector learn from decades of high performance engineering?
Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is quite a lot.
Especially in addressing thermal and energy challenges. The user technologies may be different, the core engineering principles for developing high-performance systems remain the same.
Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing our perspective on:
- Why heat matters
- Lessons from the electrification transition and why it matters to data centres
- The power problem
- Why integrated system engineering creates opportunities for data centres
- Why noise is becoming a data centre challenge.
