An innovative cooling design for SuperMUC, Europe's most powerful supercomputer, will use warm water instead of air to keep tens of thousands of microprocessors at the optimal operating speed and increase peak performance. The system, which is said to cool components 4,000 times more efficiently, will also warm the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre Campus that hosts it during the winter months, generating expected savings of up to US$1.25 million per year.
Cooling down a data center is an expensive task, as it can account for up to 50 percent of the total energy consumption of the center. The figure may be even more taxing considering that SuperMUC will be hosted in Germany, a country that, starting from this year, requires all the electricity consumed by state-funded institutions to come from 100 percent sustainable energy sources.
The innovative cooling technology developed by IBM will help address this problem. Using a design inspired by the circulatory system, it transports water as warm as 45 degrees Celsius (113° F) directly to processors and memory components. The system is 10 times as compact and consumes 40 percent less energy than a comparable air-cooled system.
According to the recently revised Top500 list, SuperMUC's impressive 18,000 energy-efficient Intel Xeon processors make it Europe's fastest supercomputer, clocking 3 petaflops (3 million billion floating point operations per second). That's a long way from the new number one on the list - the IBM Sequoia, which is seven times as fast - but with a performance comparable to that of 100,000 personal computers put together, SuperMUC isn't exactly slow, either.
This impressive number-crunching capacity will be used to aid a number of research projects across Europe, ranging from simulating the blood flow generated by an artificial heart valve to improving our understanding of earthquakes. The SuperMUC system is also connected to powerful visualization systems, including a large stereoscopic power wall and a five-sided immersive artificial virtual-reality environment for visualizing three-dimensional data sets.
The engineering team behind the project is targeting an aggressive reduction in size, saying they can reduce the volume tenfold every five years until, 30 years from now, the entire processing power of the data center will be contained in a form factor the size of a standard desktop computer, with a much higher energy efficiency than it has today.
The project is jointly funded by the German federal government and the state of Bavaria. SuperMUC will be officially inaugurated in July 2012 at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Germany. The video below explains more about the cooling mechanism.
Source: IBM
Deionized water does not conduct electricity, evaporates without leaving a residue, and carries a large amount of heat per volume.
The chips are cooled in a parallel to give all the chips equal cooling, and the central heat exchanger used to dump the heat into the buildings environmental system gives even water temperature to the chips and works well with the air handlers.
NextDC's M1 facility in Melbourne is showing similar ingenuity by having triple power sources (Utility A/C, Natural Gas Gen, Diesel Gen) configured in a N+1 scenario. This will ensure costs are controllable despite carbon taxes, etc.
http://nextdc.com/blog/132-m1-carbon-tax-and-our-tri-gen-plants-for-melbourne.html
Necessity is the mother of invention and there's no necessity like keeping an eye on your hip pocket.
(IBM states "the world's first commercially available hot-water cooled supercomputer", so the qualifiers are "Hot water", and "super computer", there are water cooled server farms already..
Not a lot New... (IBM have been using water cooling for several years... customers just need to catch on) Quote from 2007...."Water cooling is both more efficient than air cooling and can handle higher heat loads, simply because water is far more conductive of heat and has much higher thermal mass than air. It's been slow to catch on because administrators are paranoid about leaks (water and electronics certainly don't mix well), but systems are available now that have been proven reliable. IBM and HP have water-cooled server racks, and Knurr's even won a design award." http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1140/71/ )
They didn't say that the water is heated using external energy... a few passes through the system and the water will be hot. Thermostatically controlling the hot side (as in car radiators, only using liquid to liquid exchangers with a large thermal pool for sinking the heat) Using the waste heat to heat buildings is another logical step, (I hope no new patents have been granted for that..., even generating electricity from low-grade heat sources can be improved upon...)
People who know nothing about thermodynamics will just go "Wow"...
Its all about energy removal.... Even the turbulence of the coolant in the pipes affects the transfer rate... Pretty much the energy transport will usually be the "slowest part of the system", not the conductance through the walls of the heat sinking channels... Higher turbulence increases the convection to remove the heat.... Low turbulence gives a slower transfer rate, but longer pipe / channel life)
Probably take home, is that Hot water controls the temperature of the chips better than expensive cold air...