Water-cooled Aquasar supercomputer does math, heats dorm rooms

Not that we haven't seen this trick pulled before, but there's still something magical about the forthcoming Aquasar. Said supercomputer, which will feature two IBM BladeCenter servers in each rack, should be completed by 2010 and reach a top speed of ten teraflops. Such a number pales in comparison to the likes of IBM's Roadrunner, but it's the energy factor here that makes it a star. If all goes well, this machine will suck down just 10KW of energy, while the average power consumption of a supercomputer in the top 500 list is 257KW. The secret lies in the new approach to chip-level water cooling, which will utilize a "fine network of capillaries" to bring the water dangerously close to the processors without actually frying any silicon. While it's crunching numbers, waste heat will also be channeled throughout the heating system at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, giving students and dorm room crashers a good feel for the usefulness of recycled warmth.

[Haikibutsu @ Jun 25th 2009 5:38AM]

That water loop could use some overhauling.

[Shinigami @ Jun 25th 2009 5:39AM]

Instead of heating dorms, they should try heating a temperature-based electricity generator (don't remember its name or who invented it) to reduce the amount of power that supercomputer uses even by a small margin. IMO.

[trankzen @ Jun 25th 2009 6:01AM]

With direct heat to electricity conversion (via sound) still pretty much experimental to this day, the best I can think of would be a Stirling Engine coupled to a dynamo.That would mean a lot of losses due to non perfect conversion processes.
IMO it is much clever not to convert this excess heat and use it as is were needed. No losses, and you can use the cut you'll get on central heating to help pay your supercomputer's power bill.

[kakapo @ Jun 25th 2009 6:24AM]

It is a thermoelectric cooler - Peltier device invented about 1836 but has been modified in the early 1970s when transistor and semiconductors became really popular - but applying the Seebeck effect of converting heat to electricity, rather than using electron flow to actuate cooling by coolth transfer from two dissimilar metals.

You can buy a TEC and VRY carefully apply heat to one side and make sure the other side is REALLY cool and connect the leads to a volt meter and you will see the Seebeck effect in action....

Cheers

[Ken @ Jun 25th 2009 9:44AM]

Stirling is more efficient than Seebeck and in reverse is more efficient than Peltier.

Either way, using the waste heat generated to heat things is the most efficient use, no argument.

[ChillyCat @ Jun 25th 2009 5:39AM]

YES !!! it's a multi-tasking machine

[Ryback @ Jun 25th 2009 8:58AM]

I hope the students brought some blankets to the dorm. 10kw is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to heating a building.

At work (edb.com) we have a similar system using heat from the server rooms to heat the building. The servers are not directly water cooled, but the rooms are. Apparantly the company saves around $160k/year on the heating bill.

[Ken @ Jun 25th 2009 9:41AM]

10 teraflops? That's not much better than whats possible in a CUDA setup. And it it sure wouldn't take 10KW!!!!

[rnieto @ Jul 14th 2009 5:54AM]

Of course we're talking here of a supercomputer that could actually do REAL general purpose instructions. Nvidia and ATi had marketed too much the GP on the GPGPU, when in fact it is still quite limited in capability, in contrast to a real CPU.

And the whole 10 teraflops is really hard to utilize and code on a GPU. If we're talking here of mathematical processing wherein the calculations could survive with a small dataset and is ideally a loop, then you'd get your 10 teraflops.

[OLight @ Jun 25th 2009 11:56AM]

Who knew the Steampunk folks would be on to something?

Anyway, so let me get this straight. Now, to run a fast server, we'll need network engineers...and plumbers?? I'd hate to be there when/if the thing springs a leak. Unless, of course, they use Fluorinert, which would take this to a whole new level of Cool, no pun intended.

[mjohn2 @ Jun 25th 2009 12:33PM]

Can we get into true liquid cooled computers? I was working with hermetically sealed 1u servers (before the term 'blade' became popular) back in 2003, cooled with florener (sp?)...we sprayed the liquid directly on the chips and the heat dissipated to the case which looked like a big heat sink. I suppose the heat could be used or recycled as the article points out.

[chrisp @ Jun 26th 2009 7:39AM]

Wow, I can't believe I'm reading an article about a supercomputer on Engadget and no one has even asked if it can play Crysis, things really are looking up :)