Originally Published in MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Servers in the defense arena are packing ever-more electronics, posing serious thermal-management challenges. Advancements in conduction cooling, however, can reduce heat and prevent throttling in these small-form-factor designs.

 

 

Battles are fought in the real world and with modern electronic warfare systems; the battle is also “fought” internally in systems against heat and its effects on electronics. This situation is especially true in rugged battlefield servers, which mandate high mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) compared to commercial data center equipment. Battlefield servers routinely experience extreme heat in deployed environments like the Middle East, Africa, and even Arizona.

As these high-performance battlefield servers become true mobile data centers with Intel’s latest scalable Xeon processors, it’s become even more challenging to remove the heat. In vehicles, on ships, on wide-body aircraft, and within quasi-fixed, behind-front-lines operation centers, heat can be a true server killer, throttling performance and putting lives at risk.

Removing or at least reducing heat from battlefield servers can be done in multiple ways, from blown air to liquid or conduction cooling. While versions of these approaches – or a combination of the three – have been around for decades, new enhancements offer more innovative conduction-cooled hybrid-style alternatives for servers on the scorching battlefield.

Read the full article here.