Cases & Cooling

IBM's New Supercomputer Meets Hardcore Liquid Cooling

The Power 575 is a huge complex of copper pipes

By Bogdan Botezatu, Hardware Editor

8th of April 2008, 09:56 GMT

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The company could introduce water-cooling systems in mainstream offerings

Supercomputer specialist IBM has unveiled its latest supercomputer creation, touted to be five times more powerful and 60 percent more energy-efficient than its predecessors. The company's achievement is quite

impressive, since the supercomputing world is usually getting its performance boosts from pumping up more energy into the already power-hungry behemoths.

The company managed to cut down on energy costs by implementing a new water-cooling solution to keep the 448 processing cores in a rack as cool as possible. Shortly put, the cooling system draws cool water from outside the facility, runs it over the copper heat spreaders rigged on top of each processor, then moves it away from the computer.

Hardcore cooling does not only improve the overall computing performance, but it also dramatically cuts down on the electrical bill and the ownership fees. A cool-running processor rack would require less air conditioning inside the data center, one of the factors that account for half of the power consumed.

Water has been used for a long time in professional cooling solutions, as it is infinitely more efficient than plain air. According to Ross Mauri, general manager of Power systems at IBM, water is about 4000 times more efficient than the air-based cooling solutions.

The success of using water inside computers depend on two critical aspects, such as the minimum distance between the carrying pipe and the hot component, and the initial temperature of the fluid crossing the pipe.

Top-tier server vendors such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard are currently delivering blade server racks with built-in water pipes that only need to be connected to the water cooling system. However, the system has a major shortcoming, as the cool water is circulating through the pipes, but it cannot get close to the hot components.

IBM's solution places the cooling pipes right above the processor, which means that the heat transfer is dramatically improved. Also, the hydro cluster is comprised of self-contained liquid vessels that keep the fluid at a moderate temperature.

TAGS:

IBM | Server | watercooling | Power 575

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