Water-Cooled Supercomputer Doubles as Dorm Space Heater

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Massive supercomputers that devour electricity to keep them humming are not exactly the poster children for green technology. But IBM hopes to change that with its plans to build a supercomputer that will use water to keep the system cool and even recycle some of the waste heat to help heat the university where it’s housed.

Massive supercomputers that devour electricity to keep them humming are not exactly the poster children for green technology. But IBM hopes to change that with its plans to build a supercomputer that will use water to keep the system cool and even recycle some of the waste heat to help heat the university where it’s housed.

The technology could lead to a reduction in overall energy consumption by at least 40 percent, when compared to similar air-cooled machines, says the company.

"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."

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Supercomputers are used in defense 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.

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