Hot water will cool calculator.

It sounds absurd: Instead of using air to cool future computers with super hot water cooled, the waste heat of the computer be used wisely. Environment and operators which will benefit equally.

 

Hamburg / Zurich - It could be a revolution for computing are: Hot water will cool the computer giant, is treated with heat entire building will be heated. This project provided researchers at the
International Supercomputer Conference 09 (ISC 09) in Hamburg before. With the new technology can be of enormous computer power of a high around 40 percent, said the American computer specialist with IBM.

In a pilot project should now be explored how well such a system can actually work. Researchers at the company to build jointly with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) in a three-year research project, a first prototype under the name Aquasar.

The heat will be deducted for the heating of the buildings of the university used. The aim of the CO2 balance in comparison to traditional mainframe systems by up to 85 percent.

Ten times hotter than a hot plate

One of the biggest problems with the powerful super computers is their rapidly growing demand for electricity. In many installations use only 50 percent of the absorbed energy for their work, the other half is used for cooling the processors used. They create a computer chip on average ten times more heat in the same area than a conventional hot-plate, it was said.

To set the temperature of these chips to below 85 degrees Celsius to keep so far are usually air or cold water as the coolant used. Cooling is possible, however, with 60 degree water, said the researchers. The big advantage of this is that such warm water as a carrier of thermal energy directly can be used with conventional cooling water was at about 20 degrees is not so easily possible.

ON TO ONLINE blogs

The fastest computers in Europe: With the power of 50,000 PCs (26.05.2009)

High performance computers: desktop super computer graphics (19.11.2008)

Cray computers: supercomputers for atomic research at home (18.09.2008)

20 million processors: mega-computer to be ecologically predict climate (07.05.2008)

Airport-Computer: Frankfurt airport hidden brain (27.04.2008)

THE blogs: Heating with data

"The energy is the biggest challenge of the 21st century," said Dimos Poulikakos, professor and project leader at the ETH Zurich. Speed and performance of computer systems should therefore no longer the only criteria.

At the International Supercomputer Conference, which takes place from 23 to 26 June the first time in Hamburg, was energy efficiency of high performance computers is one of the central themes. "It is with increasing computing power becoming increasingly difficult, the energy intake in the high-performance computing to rein in," said IBM's Dave Turek manager in Hamburg. A challenge for the next time it will also be software programmed so that they benefit the better use of computer understands.