On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, Larry Sheldon wrote:
I have been trying to avoid saying this, but this is just nonsense with a little srinkle of "doesn't matter" here and there.
You're not the first to tell that i'm talking nonsense; but i had both experience with a water-cooled computer (not something i wish to repeat), _and_ designing hardware for COs (heck, the first computer i laid my hands on was using thyratrones (sp?) for triggers, and quite a few relays).
Actually, talking about water/electricity interaction in refrigerators, lab equipment, etc, misses the very simple point - a probability of a leak is proportional (as a good approximation :) to the number of moveable components (PCBs, connectors, etc) in the system. In a typical CO it's tens or hundreds of thousands.
I don't remember seeing anybody talking about lab equipment and refrigerators here.
Archives are at www.nanog.org.
We (some of us) were talking about liquid-cooled electronics, some of them were talking about actual experience--mine with water-cooled CPU's.
Not everything which works in one-of-a-kind supercomputers is workable in your average central office. People who build equipment which has to work for years w/o interruptions, survive quakes, power faliures and thick-fingered technicans are not idiots; and if water cooling was a real solution for CO environmental control woes, they'd use it. In an average CO a poodle on a floor has a risk of not being noticed for a couple of months. It doesn't have an alarm relay, you see? (Have you ever seen a blast of H2/O2 mix resulting from electrolysis? No?) --vadim