The Zissou project is exploring immersion cooling in large-scale cloud platforms. Our main motivation is that chip power has been steadily increasing since the end of Dennard scaling. Ever increasing power requires increasingly larger cooling infrastructures, which in turn increase costs. In fact, we expect that air cooling will become unacceptably expensive in the next 5 years. Immersion enables cheaper and more stable cooling, higher server density, and lower costs than air cooling, and has much lower engineering costs than cold plates. Immersion also enables new efficiency gains from component overclocking, better management of failures, and resource disaggregation. As part of Zissou, we are building a new Cloud OS, i.e., an intelligent control plane for immersed cloud platforms.
Zissou is a close collaboration between Azure, CO+I, E+D, and Microsoft Research.