Water-cooled IBM supercomputers for 2010

IBM and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich plan to build a water-cooled supercomputer whose surplus heat will be re-used to heat the university’s buildings. The Aquasar supercomputer will be located at the ETH Zurich facility, and it will start operations next year that is by middle of 2010. The supercomputer will combine two rack-mounted IBM BladeCenter servers, each containing multiple blades with a mixed population of IBM PowerXCell 8i and Intel Nehalem processors. It is expected to deliver a peak performance of about 10 teraflops (Floating operations per second). The installation will re-use heat directly for in-building heating. IBM estimates that the wate-rcooling scheme will reduce the system’s carbon footprint by up to 85 percent and save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide annually, compared with standard cooling approaches.

As a result this supercomputer can save up to 40 % of energy consumption. We human beings are facing a very big challenge in saving energy in 21st century, its not so easy to maintain such a big supercomputer and provide the energy required by it. It produces a lot of heat, water may be considered as a good coolant for this. so IBM has decided to create a supercomputer where water will be used as a coolant. Aquasar’s use warm water rather than cold water for cooling and it is unique and IBM patented. Water, which is 4000 times more efficient coolant than air, will enter the system at 60 degrees C. This will keep the chips in the system at operating temperatures below their maximum of 85 degrees C, according to IBM. The high input temperature of the coolant results in an even higher-grade heat as an output, which in this case will be about 65 degrees C, the company said. The system uses jet impingement cooling, which means that water makes direct contact with the back of the chip via micro-channels in the heat sink, according to research papers by the IBM and ETH scientists involved in the Aquasar project.