Projects funded under the Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems (COOLERCHIPS) program will develop novel high performance, high reliability cooling systems for compute electronics. These cooling systems will enable a new class of power-dense computational systems, data centers, and modular EDGE systems that will be cooled using 5% or less of the IT load at any location in the United States at any time of the year.
The COOLERCHIPS program will support the leveraging of recent nascent advances in thermal management, coolant flow technology, materials, manufacturing, design, controls, and reliability engineering. Illustrative example areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
- New materials, surface treatments, thermal interface solutions, manufacturing methods and conduction methods for improving heat transfer from chipsets;
- Advances in heat transfer to create and control 3D fluid structures with minimal thermal boundary layers;
- Innovations in cooling system engineering for reliability that address severity, occurrence and detectability of potential component failures and novel ideas that include system level risk mitigation, health monitoring and controls; and
- Novel modular data center or EDGE compute system designs that can operate high density compute systems at any time in any US location with highly efficient cooling systems.
The COOLERCHIPS FOA seeks to encourage the formation of multi-disciplinary teams to overcome the technology barriers for the development of high-performance cooling solutions that can simultaneously achieve the required system reliability and cost viability. Proposing teams should incorporate expertise in relevant compute servers, heat transfer, reliability, modeling, data center techno-economics, data center operation, and commercialization.