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Photo Friday: Mineral Oil Immersion

Taylor Watson

September 7th 2012

Can you tell what’s happening in this picture?  This photograph was posted today in the New York Times Green Blog; it’s a computer server submerged in mineral oil!  Intel is experimenting by cooling their servers in mineral oil- an unusual solution for an industry that revolves around technology.  Intel estimates that “using oil immersion rather than circulating air can reduce the amount of energy required to cool the computers by 10 to 20 percent.”

We frequently talk about lessening our carbon footprints by limiting the amount of energy we use with our appliances, computers, and phones, but we often forget the impact of the data centers that maintain the servers for all of our different online networks that we rely on a daily basis.  I love this photo because of the cross section between natural and manufactured resources.