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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."
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.
"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
You ever try working in a server room when the a/c is broken? In southern California? In the middle of summer? It gets unpleasant. Quickly. And when it's 110 outside, you cannot simply pipe in outside air to cool the place. a/c is also for the server admins, not just the hardware. I'd venture to guess than the equipment will fail long after I have when the place gets a bit roasty.
He didn't say "just get rid of AC". He was wondering if you designed the shape of the room where it has a constant draft. That way, the heat is cycled out of the building and cool air is pulled in from the other side. If you had a sever room that was 10 feet wide and 200 feet long, you could have one heck of a wind tunnel effect.
The hard part is where do you pull FROM. If it's like the poster said and 100+ outside, you're 'cooling' your servers with 100 degree air,
If the surface temp of your CPU is 160-200F, then cooling it with 100F air will work fine. You still have a delta-T of 60-100F. Computers do not need to be cooled with air that feels cool to a human. If the air temp is warm, it is usually much cheaper to increase the flow rate than to cool the incoming air.