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First Commercial IBM Hot-Water Cooled Supercomputer to Consume 40% Less Energy

btarunr

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The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), in collaboration with IBM, today announced the world's first commercially available hot-water cooled supercomputer, a powerful, high-performance system designed to help researchers and industrial institutions across Europe investigate and solve some of the world's most daunting scientific challenges.

The new LRZ "SuperMUC" system was built with IBM System x iDataPlex Direct Water Cooled dx360 M4 servers with more than 150,000 cores to provide a peak performance of up to three petaflops, which is equivalent to the work of more than 110,000 personal computers. Put another way, three billion people using a pocket calculator would have to perform one million operations per second each to reach equivalent SuperMUC performance. Also, a revolutionary new form of hot-water cooling technology invented by IBM allows the system to be built 10 times more compact and substantially improve its peak performance while consuming 40 percent less energy than a comparable air-cooled machine.



"This year all the electricity consumed by state-funded institutions across Germany are required to purchase 100% sustainable energy," said Prof. Dr. Arndt Bode, Chairman of the Board, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. "SuperMUC will help us keep our commitment, while giving the scientific community a best-in-class system to test theories, design experiments and predict outcomes as never before."

Pioneering Hot-Water Cooled Technology
Up to 50 percent of an average air-cooled data center's energy consumption and carbon footprint today is not caused by computing, but by powering the necessary cooling systems. IBM scientists and developers chose to address this challenge with an innovative concept of hot-water cooling, which eliminates the need for conventional data center air cooling systems. IBM's hot-water cooling technology directly cools active components in the system such as processors and memory modules with coolant temperatures that can reach as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit, or 45 degrees Celsius.

"As we continue to deliver on our long-term vision of a zero emission data center we may eventually achieve a million fold reduction in the size of SuperMUC, so that it can be reduced to the size of a desktop computer with a much higher efficiency than today," said Dr. Bruno Michel, manager, Advanced Thermal Packaging, IBM Research.


SuperMUC combines its hot-water cooling capability, which removes heat 4,000 times more efficiently than air, with 18,000 energy-efficient Intel Xeon processors. In addition to helping with scientific discovery, the integration of hot-water cooling and IBM application-oriented, dynamic systems management software, allows energy to be captured and reused to heat the buildings during the Winter on the sprawling Leibniz Supercomputing Centre campus, for savings of one million Euros ($1.25 million USD) per year.

Europe's Most Powerful Supercomputer
The SuperMUC system is Europe's fastest computer, according to the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers announced today. This performance will be used to drive a wide spectrum of research -- from simulating the blood flow behind an artificial heart valve, to devise quieter airplanes to unearthing new insights in geophysics, including the understanding of earthquakes. The SuperMUC system is also connected to powerful visualization systems, including a large 4K stereoscopic power wall and a five-sided immersive artificial virtual-reality environment or CAVE for visualizing 3D data sets from fields, including Earth science, astronomy and medicine.

The LRZ is the computer center for Munich's universities and for the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. It takes care of the scientific data network in Munich, offers a variety of data services, and provides high-end computing facilities for the scientific community across Europe.

The center's new SuperMUC system is the largest in Europe and one of the most powerful systems in the world. It is part of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) high-performance computing infrastructure for researchers and industrial institutions throughout Europe. The supercomputer is jointly funded by the German federal government and the state of Bavaria. It will be officially inaugurated in July 2012 at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Germany.

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I am interested in seeing some performance charts of the machine with this new cooling system. :respect:
 
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But can it play Crysis? ;D
 
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strange ..............
 
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I am interested in seeing some performance charts of the machine with this new cooling system. :respect:

This isn't about getting components as cool as possible. It's about using the heat from the computers to heat radiators in offices.
 
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The SuperMUC system is also connected to powerful visualization systems, including a large 4K stereoscopic power wall and a five-sided immersive artificial virtual-reality environment or CAVE for visualizing 3D data sets from fields, including Earth science, astronomy and medicine.

:rockout::toast:
 

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A leak will make the engineers cry
 
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using regular water poses significant risk to a multi million dollar machine i suppose... how'd you like to be the dope who's solderjoint leaks???
 
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Man that would be soooo much fun to build all of those servers! that would be my dream job.
 
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Pictures 3 and 4 just wow!

That's some awesome cabling, but is zip-tying to copper pipes ok?
 

Andy77

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That is how most HVAC systems are ran

HVAC is air based... still, if you take a look at any car I doubt you'll see something like this on the car's coolant hoses, nor or the AC pipes, maybe on some occasions, but on mine all are clear, even padded against contact.


Pictures 3 and 4 just wow!

That's some awesome cabling, but is zip-tying to copper pipes ok?

They might not get that hot to melt isolation but is sure make a good support for straightening out cables.
 
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With all that heat and hot water they can build public baths for homeless people.
 

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Blah,Blah,Blah. Can it make coffee? If not FUCK that shit!
 
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With all that heat and hot water they can build public baths for homeless people.

I was thinking of a laundro-mat, bulk laundry (hospitals, restaurants, hotels). That would be efficient. But...the temps seem too low.
 
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With all that heat and hot water they can build public baths for homeless people.

Build a small foot bath sauna for some funky smelling IT people. It's not cool wearing socks with sandals :laugh:
 

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You know what would be even better than all this? If they could make a chip that does not need any cooling at all. All this is just BS in my book.
 
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:eek::wtf: They sorta hijacked my general idea and gave it a fancy name,,, use pc to heat house by Ocín snot thereoff,, then fold 24/7 on all inc soundcard iff poss(1 day;)) ,,, comence strolling about in shorts perm and call whole plan and effieciency a win:D.

with water you more choose what temp and noise to run at more then anything else ,my water hits 45-50 permanently
 

faramir

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I was thinking of a laundro-mat, bulk laundry (hospitals, restaurants, hotels). That would be efficient. But...the temps seem too low.

Too low for direct usage in scenarios you outlined above perhaps, but heat pumps could be used to get higher temperature. That's still far more efficient than heating water up to really high temperatures directly.
 
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That's insane. Now lets find a game that can use 150,000 cores and 324 tb of memory.
 

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Thats what I usually do at home. Just power up my water cooled silent PC and game on it. The room will slowly warm up.
 
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This is about a supercomputer. All gaming related posters are politely but certainly being requested to leave this room and go the gaming section. Thank you.
 
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