The UK’s Durham University has deployed an immersion cooling pod.

Vesper Technologies (Vespertec) this week announced the deployment of a 50U XCI immersion cooling solution from Midas Immersion Cooling at Durham University.

Part of Durham’s Immersion Cooling and Heat Storage (ICHS) Living Lab – a research initiative exploring how immersion cooling can be paired with seasonal heat storage – the deployment will support graduates running some of the university’s most compute-intensive workloads.

Scott Constable, alliance director at Vespertec, said: “This partnership is a great example of how academia and industry can come together to tackle both computational and environmental challenges. Together with Durham University, we were able to demonstrate the potential of Midas’ immersion technology in a research environment and establish a concrete reference point for others exploring new ways to cut CO2 impact and advance data centre innovation. Our goal is to take these learnings to the wider market, and Durham’s collaborative approach makes them a great partner for what’s to come!”

Scott Sickmiller, CEO at Midas Immersion Cooling, added: “This deployment at Durham University marks a significant milestone for Midas, as we expand our presence in the UK. By combining our immersion technology with integration partners like Vespertec, we’re helping universities like Durham push the boundaries of high-performance research while growing sustainable IT operations.”

The pod is equipped with servers from Gigabyte and utilizes cooling fluids from Valvoline Global. The next deployment of the project will incorporate heat recapture.

Durham University launched a supercomputer in October 2023, dubbed COSMA 8. The supercomputer is made up of 67,584 processors, has half a petabyte of memory, and is the result of £10 million ($12.17m) in funding. The education institution is set to develop a new data center at Aykley Heads in County Durham as its existing facility is “too small to house the next generation of supercomputers.”