IBM Chills its Zurich Supercomputer with Hot Water

The big problem with supercomputers is that they use a great deal of energy. As such, companies that set up high-performance computing (HPC) installations do their best to reduce the environment footprint as much as they can. Even more unusual plans, such as using cow manure as a power source, have cropped up over the years. Now, IBM has come out and unveiled a rather unusual way of 'cooling' a supercomputer.

The thing about supercomputer energy efficiency is that the actual power draw of the CPUs can't really be optimized overmuch. This means that the cooling solution and the power supplies are what most determine the energy use of such a conglomerate. Knowing this, IBM decided to use a very unusual means of keeping the CPUs inside the supercomputer under their maximum allowed temperature of 85 degrees Celsius.

IBM used hot water. Waste hot water to be exact. Apparently, the company figured that, by using waste heat produced by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. This hot water is the same one responsible for providing heat to the buildings and supposedly has a temperature of up to 65 degrees. Granted, this doesn't exactly cause icicles to grow on the inside of the systems, but it does keep thermal conditions under control. Not to mention that liquid cooling is, according to IBM, up to 50% more efficient than air cooling. All in all, the Zurich supercomputer, aptly dubbed Aquasar, has an 85% smaller carbon footprint and a 40% lower power consumption.

"With Aquasar we achieved an important milestone on the way to CO2-neutral data centers," said Dr. Bruno Michel, manager of Advanced Thermal Packaging at IBM Research – Zurich. "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."