IBM develops water-cooled super computer
Researchers from IBM Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) have devised an efficient method for cooling computers and to demonstrate their technology, are creating a supercomputer called Aquasar, which should be completed this year. It expected to decrease the carbon footprint of the system by up to 85% and estimated to save up to 30 tons of CO2 per year, compared to a similar system using today's cooling technologies.
Aquasar is part of IBM's First of a Kind (FOAK) collaborative research programmes with clients, and will be housed on the ETH campus.
It will operate as a closed system, so the same water that cool the servers, release their heat into the buildings, then return to the computer to cool it again.
Installed at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich, an IBM BladeCenter Cluster is comprised of three IBM BladeCenter H chassis with a total of 33 IBM BladeCenter QS22 servers (two IBM PowerXCell 8i Processors each) and nine IBM BladeCenter HS22 servers (two Intel Nehalem EP Processors each).
Of those, one chassis is air-cooled for direct comparison and contains 11 QS22 servers and three HS22 servers. The rest have micro-channel liquid coolers attached directly to processors and some components within the server which are then cooled with warm water (up to 60C).
Source : Compute Scotland