Green College Tech: Water-Cooled Supercomputer Doubles as Dorm Space Heater

Massive supercomputers use a lot of energy, but a new innovation by IBM could at least recycle some of the waste heat to help heat the universities where they are housed. The company also plans to use water to keep the supercomputers cool, which could lead to a reduction of overall energy consumption by at least 40 percent compared to similar air-cooled supercomputers.

From Wired via ENN:

“Energy is arguably the number one challenge humanity will be facing in the 21st century,” says Dimos Poulikakos, lead investigator of the project. “We cannot afford anymore to design computer systems based on the criterion of computational speed and performance alone.”

Supercomputers are used in energy research labs such as Argonne National Laboratory, in space research by NASA and at universities for scientific research, all applications which have a nearly insatiable demand for processing power. The new supercomputer, called Aquasar, will be housed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich and will have a top speed of 10 teraflops. (A teraflop is a trillion floating point operations per second, a measure of computing capacity.) While that’s a lot of computing power — a Core 2 Duo processor is capable of about 20 gigaflops, or 1/500 the speed of Aquasar — it’s a fraction of what some of the fastest supercomputers today. For instance, IBM’s Blue Gene/L supercomputer, which ranks fourth on the top 100 list, has a peak speed of 596 teraflops. Meanwhile, IBM has moved on to create its first supercomputer in Europe capable of one petaflop, or one thousand trillion operations per second.

Keeping these machines cool is a challenge: many of the chips used in supercomputer systems put out ten times as much heat as a typical kitchen hot plate. They have to be kept below 185 degrees Fahrenheit for optimal performance. It takes a whole lot of energy to do that the conventional way, so using water could potentially be a huge energy saver.

And to use the excess heat to keep students warm in the winter? Sheer brilliance!

Link [Wired] via [ENN]
Photo credit: CNET

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