Cooling Environments Update and Cold Plate Subproject Overview

Author: Steve Mills, Meta (OCP Incubation Committee Representative); Jordan Johnson, Cold Plate Sub-Project Lead, Intel Collection: 2023 Global Summit - Cooling Environments

Summary

This talk opens the Cooling Environments half-day track at OCP Global Summit 2023, delivered jointly by Steve Mills (Meta, OCP Incubation Committee) standing in for absent project lead Sean Sivapalan, and Jordan Johnson (Intel), cold plate sub-project lead. The primary message is that the OCP Cooling Environments project has grown to be larger than all of OCP was in 2019, reflecting how critical liquid cooling has become across the industry — liquid cooling was mentioned in virtually every OCP 2023 keynote, compared to only one keynote mention in 2022.

Steve Mills presents the project structure: five sub-projects (Door Heat Exchangers, Cold Plate, Immersion, Advanced Cooling Facilities, and Heat Reuse) each with named leads. Jordan Johnson then reviews the cold plate sub-project's contributions since Global Summit 2022, covering four approved publications and two contributions in review. The approved contributions include the Cold Plate Development and Qualification Whitepaper, the Large Quick Connector Specification, the Warm Liquid Cooled Cloud Facilities whitepaper (Microsoft), and Cold Plate Requirements Revision 2 — published the Friday before the summit. Future activities include leak detection and mitigation case studies, mobile fluid servicing cart specifications, and a standardized testing methodology for comparing cooling components across vendors.

The talk also serves as a call-to-action for community participation, noting two open leadership positions: a co-lead for the overall Cooling Environments project (alongside Sean Sivapalan) and a co-lead for the Advanced Cooling Facilities sub-project.