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IBM Deploys Hot-Water Cooled Supercomputer
MrSeb writes "With the ISC (International Supercomputer Conference) kicking off this week, there's been a flurry of announcements around new supercomputer buildouts. One of the more interesting systems debuting this week is SuperMUC — IBM's new supercomputer at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center in Germany IBM is billing SuperMUC as the first 'hot-water cooled supercomputer,' an advance it claims cut power consumption by 40%. Dubbed Aquasar, the new system looks like any standard water cooler: water is pumped in one side of the blade, circulates throughout the system, and is pumped out. The difference, according to IBM, are the microchannels etched into the copper heatblock above the CPU cores. Rather than simply being dumped, SuperMUC's waste heat is designed to be converted into building heat during winter. Presumably it is mostly radiated away in summer, rather than being dumped into the offices of angry German scientists."
What again? Someone call Chet Heath!
what about cooking oil?
Scientists heat you!
Hot and cold isn't that hard. Maybe I am missing a point somewhere.
You take the heat energy biproduct from a processor and dump it somewhere else. In "normal" this case, an air conditioned room. Heat dissipated is being countered by air conditioning going 24/7. More energy.
Instead of watercooling, which can refrigerate a fluid (more energy in put and unusable for anything else), this removes waste heat and reuses it elsewhere.
This isn't going to work but... Instead of sitting in the tub and pissing in it continuously, your waste is being used somewhere else. (This is Germany after all)
Has anyone ever tested if we actually need air conditioning for a server room? I mean transform one into a "wind tunnel" where the waste heat is either ejected outside or used internally? Instead of a giant cube... what about a rectangle?
Will this lead to.. yo dawg I heard you like blades so we made your rack of blades into a blade?
In related news, the UN Security Council has scheduled the start of WW3 to coincide with the 5 year anniversary of SuperMUC's online-date, pending the lack of adequate air-conditioning in the angry German scientists' offices.
greed@All_Evils:~#
Those scientists wouldn't be angry to have heated offices in the summer. Germany can be downright chilly in the summer. I remember some beautiful July days in Berlin with highs in the 50s.
On top of that, heated offices will make the German scientists think they're in Mallorca or Costa del Sol and they'll be partying all day and night to the hot techno beats.
Slashdot began tracking this one two years ago.
Hehehe, too easy. But don't let me stop you.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
"Rather than simply being dumped, SuperMUC's waste heat is designed to be converted into building heat during winter. Presumably it is mostly radiated away in summer"
They might be storing the heat rather than dumping it in the summer.
We are building a meat processing facility. Meat processing facilities use a lot of energy for heating water, cooling carcasses, freezing and general storage & air conditioning. To reduce our energy needs we're storing winter in thermal mass so that we can use it during the warm seasons. We're also using the 'waste heat' from our refrigeration compressors to heat water in addition to solar hot water and the backup of propane heating for the water. All of this will save us enormous amounts of money since we won't have to buy as much energy. Good for our carbon foot print and even better for our bottom line as more money will stay in our pockets rather than being dumped into the environment. IBM could do the same.
See http://sugarmtnfarm.com/butchershop
My university building is 80m from SuperMUC; there is a large campus at the site with several thousand students and employees. In winter it most definitely makes sense to use the heat from SuperMUC, as the average temperature is about 0 degrees Celsius. In summer it might be a bit more difficult to dissipate heat on hot days, though the average temperature is still only 19 decrees Celsius for July.
This is very simple water cooling. The principle is identical to what is found in high end overclocked systems.
Your coolant only needs to be cooler than the core itself to remove heat. It's been known for a long time that dumping the heat of an overclocked system into a room through a water loop will heat said room.
Even in the dead of winter when it's 0C outside, my *one* overclocked computer can keep my 300SQ ft room heated to above 70 degrees with no additional heat sources.
News? I guess. Definitely a stale idea though.
BFD. I've been heating my house with computers for a couple of decades.
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
People need to understand and respect just how awesome water is as a coolant. The specific heat of the stuff (basically, how much heat you can 'sink' into a gram of it) and its benign, well-understood nature, and the fact that its density only changes a little bit between freezing and boiling points make it quite awesome.
I live in a city with a river through it. I really don't know why they aren't doing cooling via air-to-water heat pumps. It's really absurd to blow fans all day when the river could carry away 100X the heat without too many ill effects.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
That's the way Cray used to do it back in the day. I never worked there, but have worked with a number of Cray employees. I remember hearing descriptions of a Cray 2 being used to provide building heat, and the problems that occurred when it was finally decided to decommission the machine.
It's not a bad idea to make use of what would otherwise be waste heat. My guess is it doesn't work very well in places like Arizona or Qatar, though.
It would be trivial to upgrade 45C water to e.g. 60C with a heat pump. This could be done with high efficiency, certainly COP > 3. Of course an office building might not need that much hot water in summer (maybe for showers for those who bike to work?), but other buildings nearby might. Or use it for district heating, if they have that in the area, but with existing systems that would probably require more like 70C.
Or just get the CPU's running at 300C, of course. Then you could run a steam turbine on the coolant...
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
It is possible to hear someone speaking in a very cold day:
- Please, try the algorithm for searching prime numbers to heat this place!
Non-overclocked air cooled systems also heat the room. This article is about heating rooms that the computer isn't in.
Water can be a b***h to use in a closed-loop cooling system. If it has any appreciable electrical conductivity, you get electrolytic corrosion of different metals in the cooling loop. If you use 18 megohm DI water, you get corrosion for other reasons. Depending on whether you have exposure to air (like in an evaporative cooling tower), you get bacterial and algal blooms, dirt, dust, pigeon poop - it's not as simple as "pump the water around in a circle and move the heat with it". Many closed loop water cooling systems run about 50% glycol plus other additives to mitigate the nastiness.
Decades ago Cray heated their building in Mendota Heights Minnesota entirely using waste heat from the supercomputers. When they built their new campus a few miles away and sold the old building they had to go through some amount of trouble to retrofit it with heating from conventional fuels.
What's old is new again.
Cyrano de Maniac
The very rough idea is obvious. Going through the specifics of instrumenting a facility, of determining what the acceptable temperature and flow rate are to keep cpu die temperature at an acceptable level (note, if your cpu is still kicking, that may not be enough, voltage leakage increases with temperature, meaning power draw goes up, and you are being inefficient by letting the die get *too* hot. Also, this is the fastest x86 based system in the world. In part because the cooling is adequate to let the cpu frequency bump up more consistently. Go too far in the other direction, and you are spending too much money on cooling for diminishing returns in die temperatures and the benefits lower die temperatures bring.
We are also talking about a plumbing setup designed to keep ~10,000 servers serviceable without getting the conductive water in the wrong places. This means some significant consideration in how the plumbing connects and how to make it quickly disconnect without leaking to replace parts. The risk for a single water cooled system is small, you paid maybe too much for it and a limited volume of water is in the closed loop. This scale is a different thing.
This isn't just some overblown overclocking setup hooked into an aquarium. This is a non-trivial amount of engineering that goes into it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Laundry shops need a lot of very hot water to "cook" the dirty linen that they receive everyday
Almost all laundry shops are using water heaters - whether they be electric powered water heaters or gas-burner powered water heaters - to heat up the water
Here's my proposal:
On the side of all super-computer center or any large scale data-center the authority should draw up a special "zone" for laundry shops
That way, all the hot water generated from the computers will be put to good use - without any additional wastage of precious energy resource
It's kinda fits into the "Go Green" concept that is so popular these days
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
No, the coolant does not just need to be cooler than the core itself. It has to also be able to absorb heat faster than the core is generating it. This means that all the thermal resistances in the path must be accounted for. Usually this means that the coolant temperature must be MUCH lower than the core, which requires chilling the coolant. The difference with this system is that the incoming water temperature does not need to be particularly cool - it can be 45C/113F, which means it takes less cooling to get it down to that temperature.
... is no more
When Slashdot was brand new - trust me, I was there - there was very few racist post, and there was no "mcpc" spams either
Sigh !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Crank up ze compiler, Hans. Iz time for shower!
"Tracking": is that our new euphemism for dupes? "Slashdot tracked eight stories this week." Sounds classy. I like it!
I worked in a "state of the art" data center that opened in 1980 just outside of Washington DC. Remember that this was shortly after the oil embargoes of the 1970's, so everyone was energy conscious, maybe even more than today. The whole office building was heated in the winter solely by the heat generated by the water cooled IBM mainframes. Unfortunately as replacement equipment became more efficient, and as mainframes in general started being retired, there was no longer enough heat generated from the data center to warm the office building. Eventually they had to retrofit with a traditional heat plant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_pond
This idea was used at Princeton Univ. with great success. You put a snowmaking machine over a membrane-lined pond. Then in winter you pump water thru it. You make slush. Eventually you have a basin filled top-to-bottom with ice. Add some insulation in the spring. Pump icewater out all summer long, to a truck radiator located in your building's ductwork, or meat cooler.
The problem with simply "dumping the waste heat" somewhere is that you need to find a place where to dump it. As the story indicated, this is not so much a problem in winter, but in summer, when no one wants your heat (no offices b/c sweaty people won't be smart, no industry b/c the water is still too cool). The innovative aspect of SuperMUC is that they achieve free air cooling, even in the German summer when delta t is very very low. Another cooling fluid is not an option as refrigerators are not as power efficient. Its all about power efficiency. And TCO: LRZ saves 500k €/a by this hot water cooling compared to classic AC with "refrigerators".
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Water has an insanely high heat of vaporization. Why not utilize this property to cause water to evaporate taking enormous sums of heat with it. Tiny amounts of water can take many many Joules of heat away. Water is cheap.
In fact, you can use water to cool your house for really cheap by spraying it on your roof if you live in a location with low humidity. Just check with your local municipalities if it's legal or not because some places with water shortages may outlaw such practices.
When I worked @ Goulds Pumps in 1994 doing VB cross-platform to IBM midranges using DB/2 database engines, the oldsters there told me that when they used to use a mainframe (before I got there doing Client-Server design work which they converted over to like so many did) to heat their building via the cooling water used to cool it.
APK
P.S.=> Assuming they were telling me the truth (and I have NO REASON to believe those folks would lie about it)? Again - nothing really new or original here!
(It was an IBM mainframe too from what I can recall but not sure of the model, & they converted down to midrange AS/400 after that to which we applied Client-Server networks to using Microsoft Windows & the middleware needed (IBM ClientAccess libs iirc or RUMBA) + Novell Netware)... apk
If the facility is producing enough raw heat, use it to supplement the power requirements. I'm sure some engineer can figure out how.
My job here is done.
I worked at a telephone data center about 1994, and remember the liquid cooling on the 9021-740 they had. I think it worked ok. They had gobs of chillers still pumping cool air into the floor (cool air is drawn up from beneath the hot equipment and displaces the warm air that naturally leaves top of the hot equipment (warm air rises). They had 36 terabytes of storage, and a empty/full rate of 45 terabytes per month (if empty, they would be full to capacity in 24 days, so had to process data continually --print phone bills) to not overflow. If the water cooling ever failed, they would 'rent' water from the local municipalities fire hydrant. If you could even get the return water down to 25 degrees C (not unreasonable in winter), you would have a very effective heat exchange. On a PC, aquarium pumps work well (designed to run 24/7/365, can handle water at room temperature up to tropical temperatures etc.).