Bill Kosik, HED & The Green Grid: Inflexion Points, Common Sense & Why We've Been Here Before
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to another edition of the Cooling Data Center podcast, where we discuss the industry's trends of the past, present and hopefully future. My guest today is Bill Cossage of HED. He's Chicago based, but with more global reach than the cloud. Bill, he's a bit of a legend of mine. He's long supported liquid cooling for AI compute data centers, and he's emerged as a kind of unofficial spokesman for complete cooling designs and their environmental impacts. He's authored many books and articles, He's taken up a position with the Green Grid where he works to promote open tools, white papers and a total cost of ownership calculator, now freely available. He's a common sense approach that often makes him the go-to guy, so I know you're going to want to hear this.
Let's get to it.
Who is Bill Kosik and why does his background matter for liquid cooling?
So how are you? This is a big honor for me. I'm delighted to get a chance to talk to you. I started doing this podcast because I felt that people were just too afraid of liquid cooling in data centers. And in reality, even though we all saw the massive benefits for the higher density cooling, what was really kind of stopping people was that it hadn't been done before. And we have this age old adage, as you know, that the data center industry is all very well able to innovate as long as that innovation has been around for 20 years. So I have to say, as somebody who's getting the opportunity to talk to a guy like you, who's written many books, and I don't know, I've lost count of the number of times I've seen you as an author of something very, very deeply technical.
I really was looking forward to just getting the opportunity to have a chat with you. So thanks very much for giving me the time. I really appreciate it.
Hey, no problem. Like you said, kind of, you know, what I like to do in my career is kind of a blend of, you know, technical, but also, you know, how it's going to impact other areas to kind of bring it into the realm where it starts to become more manageable. And then, yeah, people want to start seeing it on a bigger scale.
Yeah. We'll come on to scale in a minute because nobody's ever seen it in the sort of scale it's coming in now. But one of the really nice things that I actually started to use recently or more recently was this whole, we have had so many people developing novel engineering ideas around a very traditional theme, liquid cooling of chips, but very, very novel ideas on how to go about it. I don't know how those ideas will perform at scale. I absolutely do know that they're very well able to be given very strong savings, especially when you're looking at PUR or you're looking at PUE figures or Or even if you're looking at, you know, closed loop cooling or whatever the case it is. But I don't know how those ideas are going to go at scale.
But I'm just back from Frankfurt yesterday where every single stand it seemed at that show had something to say about liquid cooling. And for me, that's a 180 degree flip from what it was only two years ago, maybe.
yeah absolutely how i see that is what uh constituent in our industry has to make kind of the biggest investment in kind of like building that and so i mean the the obvious answer is the manufacturer so it's like generally you know they're out there working on stuff that we don't even know about but when they like like verted when they come out with this this whole suite of uh liquid cooled uh you know components to do it you know so then now now we have okay we have a starting point you know we have a we have a manufacturer that's gonna kind of stand behind the design so that that that's to me
probably one of the main things that needs to come out before yeah and we had that conversation I've been backwards and forwards I've been lucky enough in recent times in the last couple of years to be able to travel backwards and forwards and attend different events like 7x24 and various OCP events in the US and I've seen that the OCP was a great place for people to kind of invest technically without having to put too much into it commercially.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:52
2
Who is Bill Kosik and why does his background matter for liquid cooling?
0:52–26:20
3
What role did manufacturers play in making liquid-cooled systems scalable?
26:20–35:38
4
How did historical mainframe liquid cooling inform today's designs?
35:38–42:30
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Cooling Data Center Podcast
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