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Aquasar: A Water-Cooled Supercomputer
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The new supercomputer is based on long-term joint research collaboration of ETH and IBM scientists in the field of chip-level water-cooling.
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009:
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) and IBM are planning to build a first-of-a-kind water-cooled supercomputer that will directly repurpose excess heat for the university buildings. The system, dubbed 'Aquasar', is expected to decrease the carbon footprint of the system by up to 85 per cent and estimated to save up to 30 tons of CO2 per year, compared to a similar system using today's cooling technologies.
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"Energy is arguably the number one challenge humanity will be facing in the 21st century. We cannot afford any more to design computer systems based on the criterion of computational speed and performance alone," explains Prof. Dr Poulikakos, ETH Zurich, head of Laboratory of Thermodynamics in Emerging Technologies and lead investigator of this interdisciplinary project. "The new target must be high performance and low net power consumption supercomputers and data centres. This means liquid cooling."
With an water-cooling system and direct heat reuse, Aquasar -- the new supercomputer, which will be located at the ETH Zurich and is planned to start operation in 2010, will reduce overall energy consumption by 40 per cent. 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 centres with direct energy re-use" advanced by scientists at IBM's Zurich Lab.
The water-cooled supercomputer will consist of two IBM BladeCenter servers in one rack and will have a peak performance of about 10 Teraflops. Each of the blades will be equipped with a microscale 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°C is sufficient to keep the chip at operating temperatures well below the maximally allowed 85°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°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 litres of water for cooling, and a pump ensures a flow rate of roughly 30 litres 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, the company explains.
"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 centres," explains Dr Bruno Michel, manager advanced thermal packaging, IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory.
The computational performance of Aquasar is a very important part of the research. Aquasar will be employed by the Computational Science and Engineering Lab of the Computer Science Department at ETH Zurich, for multiscale flow simulations pertaining to problems encountered at the interface of nanotechnology and fluid dynamics. Researchers from this laboratory will also optimise the efficiency with which the respective algorithms perform within the system, in collaboration with the IBM Zurich Lab. These activities will be supplemented with algorithms of other research labs participating in the project.
With this supercomputer system, scientists intend to demonstrate that the ability to solve important scientific problems efficiently, does not need to have an adverse effect on the energy and environmental challenges facing humanity.
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