Article doesn't even mention the Cray-2 that used Flourinert for cooling.
Flourinert turned out to be really bad for the environment, so I wonder if the article was meant to be how they have a new cooling fluid that is safer?
Maybe I'm missing something but submerging computers in a non-conductive and non-corrosive liquid has been tried many times before.
I'm not sure what the current state of this approach is, but it's not wide spread. What makes this particular attempt special as compared to other attempts?
I don‘t like how they mix up different ideas:
1) having liquid instead of air as the first heat transporting medium 2) having water evaporation chillers instead of air heat exchangers and maybe heat pumps to chill the (last) heat transportation medium.
I like the idea of entering a datacenter without hearing protection, but would fear the occurrence of a meltdown when somewhere a loss of fluid occurs.
Like the old Cray supercomputers that were immersed in liquid freon?
None of this is particularly new. Horizontal submerging has been an area of research for at least 20 years. Spinny disks were a pain to do, because they need a certain amount of air to not have head crashes. (Sealed HDDs existed I'm sure. )
The problem is that its not that practical. Firstly it much less dense than upright racks, secondly its almost certainly more heavy.
What is happening now is direct watercooling to the rack. Currently in widespread use is effectively a back of rack "car" radiator (ie it looks like a rack sized car radiator), where the coolant is piped to the back of the rack.
Another, newer, but needed for high density GPU, is coolant block direct to component cooling. Where you have a coolant manifold on the back of the rack with each server plumbed direct into the coolant loop.
However, that doesn't solve the problem of what to do with the heat once you have it.