Since the advent of computers, scientists have been trying out ways to get more and more computing power. However, this increase in pure horsepower comes at a price. The more the computing power of a supercomputer, the more is the need for cooling. According to statistics, half of the total energy consumed by such a computing center is used by the cooling systems which help keep all that machinery at adequate temperature. To better things a bit and make computing energy efficient, IBM has come up with a unique water cooling system that is stated to reduce the energy consumed by Europe’s fastest supercomputer by as much as 40 percent.
Installed at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center’s SuperMUC supercomputer, the water cooling system, dubbed Aquasar, doesn’t need water to be cooled before it is circulated over the heated components. Rather, the system can operate with hot water up to 40 degrees Celsius, which means that hot water that comes out of the circulation system can be cooled ambient air or through a heat exchanger, also reducing the energy a compressor cooling system would have consumed. In the Leibniz installation, water heated by the supercomputer is circulated through a heat exchanger and all that heat is used to keep the building warm during winters. This way, the overall energy saving could be around the one million euro mark each year.
Being energy efficient doesn’t reduce the computing power of the SuperMUC supercomputer as the system includes about 150,000 processor cores in its 9400 compute nodes. With more than 300 terabytes of installed RAM, the fastest supercomputer in Europe has a peak performance output of three petaflops. All that while saving a handsome amount of energy.
Via: TechnologyReview
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