Immersion IT Equipment (ITE) Workstreams Update

Author: Austin Hipes (Chief Technologist and VP of Engineering, Unicom Engineering; OCP ITE Technical Committee Chair) Collection: 2025-OCP-EMEA-Summit-Immersion-Cooling

Summary

Austin Hipes, OCP ITE Committee Chair and Chief Technologist at Unicom Engineering, presented the status of the three active workstreams under the OCP Immersion IT Equipment (ITE) Committee at OCP EMEA Summit 2025 (Dublin, 29–30 April). The ITE Committee focuses on the specific challenges of integrating IT equipment into immersion cooling environments: designing hardware optimized for fluid immersion, assessing fluid impacts on IT equipment performance, and developing guidelines for installation, configuration, and maintenance. Two entirely new workstreams launched in 2025 — IT Design Guidelines and Advanced Cooling Techniques (ACT) — join the long-running Signal Integrity workstream.

The central message: the guidelines and standards enabling multi-vendor interoperability for IT equipment in immersion do not yet exist at the necessary breadth and depth, and the community is now building them. The IT Design Guidelines workstream has not had a major update since December 2020; the new effort is collecting industry-wide input through focus groups across server OEMs, integrators, silicon manufacturers, fluid providers, and regulatory bodies. The ACT workstream addresses the growing need for thermal solutions for silicon above 500W in immersion, with Intel's OCP open-source Targeted Flow Heatsink as the first reference design. The Signal Integrity workstream has produced the most concrete quantitative results: DDR5 FEXT/NEXT crosstalk is demonstrably lower in dielectric fluid than in air (immersion is better), OSFP 800G insertion loss is higher in fluid (marginal for 112G signals), and a DDR Immersion System Margin Test table shows DDR5 at 1DPC 6400 MT/s passes with similar margin to air, 2DPC 5200 MT/s passes with slightly worse margin, and MRDIMM 8800 MT/s passes with slightly better margin.