Water cooled IBM Supercomputer project
Last updated 6/29/2009 6:09:23 PM
Water cooled IBM Supercomputer project
Plans to build a first-of-a-kind water-cooled supercomputer have been unveiled by IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in an effort to achieve energy-aware computing.
The supercomputer will directly repurpose excess heat for the university buildings. The innovative system, dubbed Aquasar, is expected to decrease the carbon footprint of the system by up to 85% and estimated to save up to 30 tons of CO2 per year.
The project, a three-year collaborative research in emission-free high performance computing is part of IBM's First-Of-A-Kind program (FOAK), which engages IBM's scientists with clients to explore and pilot emerging technologies that address real world business problems.
Energy is arguably the number one challenge humanity will be facing in the 21st century, according to Prof. Dr. Poulikakos of ETH Zurich, head of the laboratory of hermodynamics in emerging technologies and lead investigator of this interdisciplinary project.
"We cannot afford anymore to design computer systems based on the criterion of computational speed and performance alone ... the new target must be high performance and low net power consumption supercomputers and data centres. This means liquid cooling," he added.
With an innovative water-cooling system and direct heat reuse, Aquasar, which will be located at the ETH Zurich and is planned to start operation in 2010, will reduce overall energy consumption by 40%. The system is based on long-term joint research collaboration of ETH and IBM scientists in the field of chip-level water-cooling, as well as on a concept for "water-cooled data centers with direct energy re-use" advanced by scientists at IBM's Zurich Lab.
"Heat is a valuable commodity that we rely on and pay dearly for in our everyday lives. If we capture and transport the waste heat from the active components in a computer system as efficiently as possible, we can reuse it as a resource, thus saving energy and lowering carbon emissions.
"This project is a significant step towards energy-aware, emission-free computing and data centers," explains Dr. Bruno Michel, manager advanced thermal packaging at IBM's Zurich research laboratory.
The water-cooled supercomputer will consist of two IBM BladeCenter(R) servers. Each of the blades will be equipped with a microscale high-performance liquid cooler per processor, as well as input and output pipeline networks and connections, which allow each blade to be connected and disconnected easily to the entire system.
Water as a coolant has the ability to capture heat about 4,000 times more efficiently than air, and its heat-transporting properties are also far superior. Chip-level cooling with a water temperature of approximately 60 degrees C is sufficient to keep the chip at operating temperatures well below the maximally allowed 85 degrees C. 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 pipelines from the individual blades link to the larger network of the server rack, which in turn are connected to the main water transportation network. The water-cooled supercomputer will require about 10 liters of water for cooling, and a pump ensures a flow rate of roughly 30 liters per minute.
The entire cooling system is a closed circuit: the cooling water is heated constantly by the chips and consequently cooled to the required temperature as it passes through a passive heat exchanger, thus delivering the removed heat directly to the heating system of the university in this experimental phase. This eliminates the need for today's energy-hungry chillers.
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