User:Creativenexus95/sandbox/Aquasar

The Aquasar is a supercomputer developed by IBM and located at in Zurich. It operates at six teraflops, which is 10^12 floating-point operations per second. By using hot water for cooling, it is able to consume up to 40% less energy than a comparable air-cooled system. Data centers that are cooled with air are significantly more inefficient than hot-water cooled systems due to the amount of energy required for air to cool the microprocessors. The Aquasar uses water that is 140 degrees Fahrenheit, which allows it to achieve 85% heat efficiency.

Water Cooling System

Unlike traditional data servers, the Aquasar’s cooling system is powered by water heated to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. This allows it to consume up to 40% less energy than other air-cooled systems. The entire process itself requires about 10 liters of water for cooling, with a pump rate of 30 liters per minute. Inspired by the human blood circulation system, the Aquasar’s liquid pumping system resembles tiny water pipes snaking through computer chips. Since the water is at a lower temperature than the chips, it cools them to well below the maximum operating temperature, allowing them to function effectively. This innovative hot water-cooling system consists of micro-channel liquid coolers attached directly to the processor, where most heat is generated. The entire cooling system itself is a closed circuit. The cooling water is heated constantly by the chips and consequently cooled to the required temperature as it passes through a passive heat exchanger, thus delivering the removed heat directly to the heating system of the ETH Zurich campus where the Aquasar is being tested. This eliminates the need for water chillers, which are generally energy-intensive. With this chip-level cooling, the heat resistance between the processor and the water is reduced to the extent that even cooling water temperatures of up to 60 degrees Celsius ensure that the operating temperatures of the processors remain well below the maximum of 85 degrees Celsius. The high temperature of the coolant results in an even higher heat exertion at temperatures up to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Aquasar’s water-cooling system removes heat 4,000 times more efficiently than air. The waste heat released is used to heat ETH’s university buildings, reducing the supercomputer’s carbon footprint by up to 85%, which would reduce up to 30 tons of Carbon dioxide emissions per year.

Components

The Aquasar’s components allow it to be an effective, yet efficient data center. It features two servers powered by an Intel processor specially designed for data centers. The specialized heat sink comprised of micro-channel liquid coolers are on board with two Bladecenter servers powered by Intel’s latest Xeon processor architecture. It also has a storage server and high-speed switches. To operate the system, the Aquasar requires 10 kW of energy. In contrast, comparable systems that use different energy conservation technologies use about 257 kW of energy.

Current Usage

SuperMUC

The SuperMUC is the first commercial hot-water cooled supercomputer that is 40% more efficient than a comparable air-cooled system. Launched July 2012, it is currently Europe’s fastest supercomputer, and is the 4th fastest system in the world. Located at the Leibniz Supercomputing center of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich, the SuperMUC integrates IBM’s Aquasar system, which allows it to be efficient yet effective. It requires only 3.52 megawatts of power consumption in order to function, which dramatically reduces the cost of ownership. The hot-water cooling system pumps water over the microprocessors, then away from the 147,000 CPU cores. Because it integrates the Aquasar, the SuperMUC exerts waste heat, which can then be recycled towards other uses.

ETH Zurich

The Aquasar data center is not widespread yet, as it is still being tested at the Computer Science and Engineering lab of the Computer Science department at ETH Zurich for research in nanotechnology and fluid dynamics. Researchers also look to optimize the efficiency of the algorithms that run within the system. With this supercomputer system, they are looking to demonstrate the idea that the ability to solve scientific problems efficiently doesn’t need to adversely effect the environment. IBM seeks to standardize its new hot water cooling system and to make the previous air-cooled systems obsolete in order to establish more environmentally friendly data servers with a smaller carbon footprint throughout the world.