John Herboth is a leading authority in commissioning mission-critical facilities. He has nearly 20 years of experience commissioning buildings across the United States.
John focuses on the commissioning process, quality control, and assurance activities that help project teams identify issues early in design and construction to improve the quality, functionality, and performance of building systems.
John provides technical and team leadership on projects, specializing in central utility plant hydronic systems, fire life safety special inspections, enclosure commissioning, and direct-to-chip liquid-cooled systems. He is currently serving as past president of the Building Commissioning Association (BCxA) Northwest Chapter and believes that sharing project successes, lessons learned, and best practices is a professional responsibility.
Q. Liquid-cooled IT systems have been around for decades. How have requirements for pre-commissioning and cleaning evolved?
While direct-to-chip liquid cooling has been around for decades—since the IBM System/360 Model 91 was developed in the 1960s—the computation output and thermal heat load was relatively small. Now artificial intelligence is driving the industry forward at rocket speed, with ever-increasing computational output resulting in high electrical consumption and thermal heat generation. The industry is experiencing growing pains at every level, from utilities to building systems infrastructure and all the way down to the materials and products that connect, cool, monitor, and control today’s new graphics processing units (GPU).