IBM has built a supercomputer that is
cooled by hot water.
IBM has shipped the
supercomputer, called “Aquasar,” to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
Zurich—or ETH Zurich—that
contains the new cooling system.
Aquasar, announced July 2, consumes up to 40 percent less
energy than a similar air-cooled machine, and by using waste heat to warm
buildings at the university, can reduce the system’s carbon footprint by up to
85 percent.
IBM officials said their
engineers in Switzerland
and Germany
began developing Aquasar as part of the company’s First-Of-A-Kind program.
Through the FOAK program, IBM scientists are
tasked with working with customers to find solutions to business problems.
In this case, the issue was power consumption and cooling. IBM
officials said that up to 50 percent of the energy consumption and carbon
footprint of an average air-cooled data center is generated by the system to
cool the computers, rather than the computers themselves.
The Aquasar compute cluster, which is fully operational, has a
combination of IBM BladeCenter blade
systems, some of which use the new hot-water cooling system, and others that
are air-cooled.
In all, Aquasar has three BladeCenter H chassis with a total of
33 BladeCenter QS22 servers—each of which is powered by two PowerXCell 8i
processors—and nine BladeCenter HS22 systems that contain two Intel Xeon 5500
series “Nehalem EP” chips.
Two of the BladeCenter H Chassis are water-cooled, with a total
of 22 BladeCenter QS22 and six HS22 servers.
Each system comes with a liquid cooler for each processor, as well
as input and output pipelines. The liquid coolers are attached directly to the
processor, which is cooled by water that is up to 60 degrees Celsius, or 140
degrees Fahrenheit. The system will keep the processors well below the maximum
temperature of 85 degrees Celsius, or 185 degrees Fahrenheit, according to IBM.
The water in the Aquasar system is hotter than that used in
typical liquid-cooled systems. IBM estimates
that water removes heat 4,000 more efficiently than air, and does a better job
of transporting that heat.
In the closed-circuit cooling system, the water that is heated
by the processor is run through a passive heat exchanger, which removes much of
the heat. That heat is then directed to the university’s heating system for use
to help keep the buildings warm.
Aquasar is part of a three-year research program called
"Direct use of waste heat from liquid-cooled supercomputers: the path to
energy saving, emission-high performance computers and data centers."
Along with ETH Zurich
and IBM Research-Zurich, ETH
Lausanne, also in Switzerland,
is part of the program.
According to IBM, Aquasar
can reach performances of 6 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per
second), with an energy efficiency of about 450 megaflops per watt.
The company estimates that 9 kilowatts of thermal power are fed
into the university’s building heating system.
“With Aquasar we achieved an important milestone on the way to
CO2-neutral data centers," Bruno Michel, manager of Advanced Thermal
Packaging at IBM Research–Zurich, said in a
statement. "The next step in our research is to focus on the performance
and characteristics of the cooling system, which will be measured with an
extensive system of sensors, in order to optimize it further."
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