IBM water cools supercomputer
Water palaver
IBM HAS resorted to using water-chilled copper plates to keep its new Power 575 supercomputer cool.
The plates are located above each Power 6 microprocessor in the beast to remove heat from the electronics.
The Power 575 boasts 448 processor cores per rack. A single rack features 14 2U nodes, each with 32, 4.7-GHz cores of Power6, 3.5 TB of memory. But IBM still claims it is more energy efficient than traditional air-cooled designs.
In fact, at 600 GFlops per node, the Power 575 is three times more energy-efficient in GFlops per kilowatt than the Power5 generation of air-cooled processors , IBM said.
The system supports very large clusters with hundreds of nodes and enables extreme performance in dense packaging.
IBM bunge a video of the monter in action on Youtube, here.
Dr. Hermann Lederer, head of Application Support at Garching Computing Center (RZG), Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany reckons the computer "will enable Max Planck researchers to tackle new challenging scientific problems and solve single compute tasks five to 20 times faster than is possible on the current system, which was Germany's fastest supercomputer in 2002."
IBM boffins reckon water can be up to 4,000-times more effective in cooling computer systems than air. µ
Comments
Power6 IS NOT energy Efficient
Water cooling is a bandaid. Why isn't IBM fixing the power consumption/ heat challenges at the CPU level? A rack of p 575's which is 448 Power6-cores @ 4.7 GHz consumes 71.7 kW !! At the rate that IBM's Power CPU developemnts continue to consume power and generate massive heat, they'll need more than water to cool these hot chips down!Aye, and water's an improvement over milk
I believe the last milk-cooled super-beast was booted in Curdistained. Oops! I've gone and spilt it now! [sob]Sod.
IBM has been using chilled-water since they were building those huge 3270 locomotives, and inventing DP, and other such dervish.
Old news
Supercomputers have been watercooled since long before it was fashionable.I dont see what the big deal here is. Other than it being one beastly computing unit.
Pah!
Bet they're pussies when it comes to overclocking...IBM bunge a video on Youtube
The video has a clever thing in it: using the water cooling waste heat for heating in people's radiators, hot showers etc.This is good because a standard heater would use a lot of power without actually doing any computation, in principle you could get the computing almost for nothing provided you wanted a certain amount of heating.
Water vs. Air
All has to do with relative specific heats, i.e., the heat capacity per unit volume at a givern temperature. Water has a far higher Cp than Air, in fact air is more of a thermal insulator. Most wall and roof insulation only acts to create pockets of "dead", i.e., non-circulating air,Now if we could only find a fluid with the heat capacity of water, but non-conductive...
Radiator Leaks?
So what happens to the computer when the micro pipes start to rust and leak? The video says that the water is as close as possible to the CPU cores. Cool idea, but it seems like it could short an entire rack at a time.