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

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• Publié par: ibm-corporation
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• Langue: English

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First Commercial IBM Hot-Water Cooled

Supercomputer to Consume 40% Less Energy

PR Newswire

MUNICH, June 18, 2012

- Leibniz's "SuperMUC" named

Europe

's fastest supercomputer

MUNICH

,

June 18, 2012

/PRNewswire/ -- The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre

(LRZ), in collaboration with IBM (NYSE: 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.

YouTube: http://youtu.be/LzTedSh51Tw

Flickr Photos: http://flickr.com/gp/ibm_research_zurich/m89ZD2/

Timeline: IBM's History and Future in Water Cooled Computing (1966-2060)

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.

IBM (Contacts in Europe)

Hans-Juergen Rehm

Chris Sciacca

Grit Abe

[phone]

[phone]

[phone]

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

IBM (Contacts in US)

Jim Smith

Joanna Brewer

[phone]

[phone]

[e-mail]

[e-mail]