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IBM Supercomputer Cooled With Hot Water
1sockchuck writes "IBM has deployed an innovative supercomputer cooled by hot water in a Zurich computer lab. The Aquasar supercomputer employs a chip-level liquid cooling system that can use water at temperatures as high as 60 degrees C (140 degrees F), and as a result consumes up to 40 percent less energy than a comparable system using room-level air-cooling. The system also uses waste heat to provide warmth to buildings, reducing Aquasar's carbon footprint even further."
You could prepare soup while you supercompute?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I was at LISA '09, and Dr. Bruno Michel (works for IBM, mentioned in the article) made a presentation on this work (or at least very, very similar work). You can see the presentation, or download the MP3, here:
http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa09/tech/tech.html#michel
Interesting talk, and well worth your time.
Carousel is a lie!
There is a video in the article, as well as a diagram that seems to explain how this works. (the long and short of it is, the hot water cools off quickly towards the lower atmospheric temperature (which allows passive coolers), but is cool enough to remove heat from the chips.
first?
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
6 TeraFlops is not much, it will not be close to even a 500th place at top500.org.
I realize it's new technology, but it is a bit too early to call it a supercomputer.
When the pipes start leaking, it won't pee all over the board
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Take a long bath and the recirculated bath water will be nice and toasty!
When will they talk about the cooling capabilities of a GEET Heat Exchanger, or pre-ignition Catalytic Converter? Plasma physics practically transmutes radiant heat into actual matter, so that would be interesting if excess heat was carbonized into coal or perhaps into White light for an inductable surface-level cold fusion illuminance and energy collection from the surrounding environment! This would do well to cool rooves, because I know that rooftops on houses absorb sunlight into heat that does more to cause The Greenhouse Effect than actual Greenhouse Gas released through combustion.
PS: Thread Lost, OP's face: \*o*/
Not completely AMD, but IBM's Roadrunner system (built in 2008) uses AMD chips in conjunction with Cell procs.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Water is really an effective cooler even at what you might normally think of as quite high temps.
Reminds me that you can die of hypothermia even in tropical waters of 80 degrees if you are unfortunate enough to get trapped in such water for long enough.
when there is a perfectly straight-forward clear phrase: energy efficiency.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
"Home heated with ice water."
This ain't rocket surgery.
"Honey, we ran out of hot water, could you put on some DOOM5 while computing all of pi?"
-]Phreak Out[-
...hot water cools you!
Neutrons don't vote. You need to be assimilated into an acceptable party approved by government.
The problem is, you can't conserve your way out of the current set of problems. Just plugging the thing in consumes power. Power that, if it wasn't generated in the first place, wouldn't need any help in reducing some carbon footprint.
Come on, folks. There are two possible alternatives here. Plugging in yet another computer pushes things closer and closer to a tipping point where all life on the planet may suddenly die or there is no such thing as "anthropomorphic climate change", in which case it makes no difference. You can't have it both ways, which means any "conservation" effort which doesn't have a net negative consumption of resources is simply misdirection.
So if you want to talk about carbon footprints, it is really quite simple - don't plug it in. Unplug something else. This is a net benefit. Everything else, and I do mean everything else, is just moving things closer and closer to the point where the problems will be obvious.
So far, I have yet to see someone actually unplug something. They will make all kinds of excuses about how they are really "conserving" something or another by making their own lives easier. They are taking advantage of the electric power that through its generation may be destroying the biosphere. They are flying in planes that may be destroying the biosphere. They are driving cars that may be destroying the biosphere. I don't care if they traded in a Hummer for a Prius - it is simply a matter of degree. So they are contributing to the end of all life on the planet a little more slowly than they were before.
Of course, the other alternative is that "climate change" is something that is happening fully apart from the actions of humans and it makes no difference between driving a Hummer or a Prius, or not driving at all - as far as climate change is concerned. But to a lot of people it is deeply offensive to think that there are things that are utterly and completely beyond their (or anyone else's) control. I like to call this the "Not a sparrow shall fall" philosophy.
So if you are deeply committed to anthropomorphic climate change, go out a blow something up today or tomorrow. You will be doing your part to ensure that life does not end on Planet Earth. One (empty) jetliner is probably worth 1000 cars, at least.
Using fire to fight fire?
If a lot of people take a shower all at once will this cause a network latency?
wouldn't it work better with cold (or at least room temperature) water? After all there is a lot more water around at ambient temperature.
And if the ambient temperature gets to 60c then global warming has gone too far, and the planet is uninhabitable (by humans anyway.
They could attach the system to the bathroom urinals and gain additional heating for the building.
If you fancy the incidental availability of your expelled heat for building heating, it means that you are in a cool enough climate that can perhaps take advantage of a cheaper design that use the cold ambient air?
Also Newton's law of cooling regarding the rate of heat transfer being proportional to the difference in temperatures might have been a design dogma more sedate engineers might have avail themselves to.
i knew there's be underclocking enthusiests sooner or later
drinking too much of that ellicit waters is right. pro'ly drinkin on his rooves too.
You're aware that the #1 in the top500 is an Opteron machine right?
In what, heat output?
nonlinear, and even exponental change in resistance etc with increase in temperature
So basically they just made the heat-sink bigger and added convection to it.
Good idea, but still rather simple.
I especially love how they heat the building the using a radiator, just like my car.
yeah, a geeky quibble: In heating (and i guess therefore cooling) system design "hot water" is water just below boiling, thus 200F to 210F. Warm water is 180 to 200F. This is neither, so to call is hot or even warm is a gross exaggeration. (True story: when I built my own heating system some time ago i ran into this confusion because the engineers and spec sheets kept talking about "warm water heating" which sounded to me like bathing temperature. Totally wrong, and it took a while before I ferreted out the information that brought understanding.)
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
A flight of fancy of mine recently is the idea of using high powered CPUs as heaters. Imagine if every hair dryer and electric grill was part of a massive distributed computing effort. When my girlfriend is drying her hair should could be computing the folding of proteins!
:(
Shame the least likely part is me having a girlfriend.
The most dangerous drug