IBM blows in Aquasar supercomputer cooled by hot water
One of the frequent complaints plaguing PC users is the problem of the system delivering low performance after heating up beyond the normal temperature. As a solution to this dilemma, IBM has brought in the Aquasar which is a supercomputer that uses hot water to cool down. The company presented it to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich ushering in a new era in energy-aware computing.
The supercomputer features the unique water-cooled IBM BladeCenter servers. The device boasts of delivering a performance of six Teraflops and power efficiency of 450 megaflops per watt. The waste heat is used to provide warmth to university buildings, thus reducing Aquasar’s carbon footprint by up to 85%. The water in the Aquasar is cited to absorb up to 4,000 times more heat as compared to air cooling systems.
“With Aquasar, we make an important contribution to the development of sustainable high performance computers and computer system. In the future it will be important to measure how efficiently a computer is per watt and per gram of equivalent CO2 production,” affirmed Prof. Dimos Poulikakos, head of the Laboratory of Thermodynamics in New Technologies, ETH Zurich.
“With Aquasar we achieved an important milestone on the way to CO2-neutral data centers,” explained Dr. Bruno Michel, manager of Advanced Thermal Packaging at IBM Research, Zurich. “The next step in our research is to focus on the performance and characteristics of the cooling system which will be measured with an extensive system of sensors, in order to optimize it further.”
The components of the supercomputer are kept cool with water heated up to 60°C. The chip-level cooling means that the thermal resistance between the processor and the water is scaled to the extent that the operating temperature of the processor remains lower than 85°C in spite of the hot water that cools it.
The Aquasar supercomputer boasts of being part of IBM’s FOAK venture which is a part of the program built to save excessive energy consumption in computers and data centers.
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