Water-cooled IBM Supercomputer available by 2010
Zurich, Switzerland – Aiming to cut emissions from data centers, IBM has unveiled a new high performance computer that uses water for cooling.
The Aquasar supercomputer will be located at the ETH Zurich facility, and it will start operations next year, the partners said in an announcement on Tuesday.
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.
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. The comparison calculations are based on average yearly operation of the system and on in-building heating energy being produced by fossil fuels, the company said.
The energy-consuming refrigeration units used by almost every data center consume about half of the a data center’s energy. Aquasar will need no such equipment. As a result, it should reduce overall energy consumption by 40 percent, according to IBM.
“Energy is arguably the number-one challenge humanity will be facing in the 21st century. We cannot afford anymore to design computer systems based on the criterion of computational speed and performance alone,” Professor Poulikakos of ETH Zurich, the leader of the Aquasar project, said in a statement. “The new target must be high-performance and low-net power consumption supercomputers and data centers. This means liquid cooling.”
The system is the product of an extended joint research project between ETH and IBM scientists, focused on chip-level water-cooling. It also encompasses a concept for “water-cooled data centers with direct energy re-use” proposed by scientists at IBM’s Zurich Lab.
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