Systems-Level Integration of Immersion Cooling: An Overview of the OCP Solutions Technical Committee

Author: Amy Short, PhD, Denvr Dataworks (Committee Chair); Andy Young, PhD, Aspiritas (TCO lead); Eduard Roytman, Microsoft (TCO co-lead) Collection: 2024 OCP Global Summit - Cooling Environments & Immersion

Summary

This presentation is the opening of the OCP Immersion Solutions Technical Committee segment at OCP Global Summit 2024. Chaired by Amy Short, PhD (Denvr Dataworks), the committee is organized into five workstreams: Immersion Requirements, Power Distribution, Hardware Management, TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Modeling, and FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis). The committee also maintains a Product Acceptance process for the OCP Marketplace, approving vendor products for the immersion category.

The presentation covers the committee's organizational structure, its top five community challenges (representation, diversity in approach, community growth, industry urgency, and balance between safety standardization and performance innovation), and provides spotlight summaries of two workstreams that did not have dedicated talk tracks at the summit: FMEA and TCO modeling.

The FMEA workstream's inaugural focus was ignition risk in single-phase immersion, specifically flashpoint and auto-ignition scenarios. Using Miro collaborative whiteboards, the group generated more than 1,000 scenario entries across 7 component categories, distilled to over 100 structured ranked failure mode entries. The initial FMEA finding on power supply abnormal operation was validated in real hardware testing — confirming that existing safeguards worked correctly even under extreme conditions — and will be summarized in a community whitepaper. The TCO Modeling workstream released version 1.0 of an open, downloadable TCO tool at OCP Summit 2024. The tool compares air-cooling vs. immersion (and other modalities) across three levels of input granularity, using TMY (Typical Meteorological Year) weather data for economization calculations. A sample comparison showed: PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) drops from 1.43–1.47 (air) to 1.15–1.43 (immersion) at ASHRAE zone 2A; CAPEX: €57.4M (air) vs. €54.3M (immersion); OPEX: €14.0M/yr (air) vs. €11.7M/yr (immersion) — for a 5,000 kW critical load data center.