2 July 2009
Aquasar - water-cooled supercomputer used for heating
Posted by Cecilia under: Economy; Energy .
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich ETH and IBM announced plans last week to build a first-of-its-kind water-cooled supercomputer that will directly repurpose excess heat for university buildings.
Dr. Poulikakos of ETH Zurich, head of the Laboratory of Thermodynamics in Emerging Technologies and lead investigator of this interdisciplinary project explained: “The new target must be high performance and low net power consumption supercomputers and data centers. This means liquid cooling.”
The bulk of the energy a computer uses is for the cooling systems to keep the processors from overheating. A computer chip creates about 10 times more heat than a cooking plate making it necessary to cool the chip. Without proper cooling the chip would be destroyed in seconds.
Conventional computers chips are cooled by air, but since water stores heat 4,000 times better than air ETH and IBM researchers designed a water-cooling system called Aquasar.
The water-cooling system is a micro-channel-cooler placed on the backside of the chip. It cools the chip while at the same it will be used for heating buildings.
With its innovative water-cooling system and direct heat reuse Aquasar will be able to save about 40% in heating energy and to reduce the carbon footprint by about 50%.
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Today in Sikantis – July 2, 2009 « Sikantis Says:
2 July 2009 at 1:57 am.
[...] Innovative News – Aquasar – water-cooled supercomputer used for heating [...]
