Bernard Poulin: Innovations in Data Center Cooling

As CEO and president of the S.M. Group International, Bernard Poulin has led the business to develop engineering solutions across a wide variety of applications.

The company operates in more than two dozen countries and employs over 1,400 individuals.

Bernard Poulin and his team seek to bring creative solutions to the complicated engineering dilemmas of today.

With computer data centers consuming something near 2 percent of electricity produced worldwide, and with their prevalence continuing to grow, it is only reasonable that high-tech computing companies seek to reduce the overall costs required to build and run these centers efficiently.

Controlling the heat produced by these large data processing machines accounts for a significant proportion of these costs. Companies such as Facebook have received a good deal of press coverage for their use of the local climate to effect cooler data centers.

Other companies are experimenting with the practicality of submerging components in cooling liquids, such as oil and even water, to mitigate the costs of air-cooling.

S.M. Group has developed an integrated design that takes advantage of known aids to air-cooling in these environments, such as pre-cooling, but its innovation lies in the use of pressurized air in the data center itself.

The design has the computer components bathed in continuous airflow, not unlike that of a wind tunnel.

The savings in cooling are as much as 50 percent, but perhaps just as attractive is the cost savings in capital production, which is estimated at up to 40 percent.

Finally, this method also allows for other current energy saving measures to be used in tandem with the design.