IBM's latest supercomputer is hooked up to the watercooler.
Big Blue has come out with a new version of its high-end supercomputer, the Power 575, which can provide five times the performance of its predecessor on 40 percent of the power. A fully stocked Power 575 rack contains 448 processing cores.
An IBM technician inserts the copper piping.
(Credit: IBM)A substantial part of the decrease in power consumption is due to a water cooling system that brings in chilled water from the outside, runs it through copper plates located above individual processors to absorb heat, and then draws the water out so it can expel the heat outside of the computer.
By getting rid of heat in this manner, the air conditioning requirements are greatly reduced for the "hydro cluster" 575. Air conditioning can account for roughly half of the power consumed by data centers. Conversely, instead of cutting electricity consumption, IBM, or one of its customers, could squeeze in more computing power into the same room and keep the air conditioning constant.
Computer makers have employed liquid cooling in various ways over the decades. Many liquids, and particularly water, can hold far more heat than air. Similarly, architects and building owners are experimenting more with liquid cooling and heating systems as energy prices rise.
"Water is about 4,000 times as efficient as air to cool a system," said Ross Mauri, general manager of Power systems at IBM.
The effectiveness of a water cooling system, however, depends largely on two parameters: how close you can get the fluid to the hot component and how cool you can get the liquid. In general, the closer the fluid to the chip and cooler the initial temperature, the better it works.
IBM, Hewlett-Packard and others have created blade server racks with integrated chilled water tubes. Chilled water circulates through the pipes but can't get as close to the hottest components.
The company has also created liquid cooling systems that fit inside computers and sit directly above hot components. These systems, however, have consisted of self-contained liquid vessels. The fluid heats up, rises, and then sinks again, but it stays moderately warm.
With the hydro cluster, "there is always chilled water in the system," Mauri said.
IBM isn't alone in its pursuit of brining liquid close to the chip. In February, the Tyndall Institute, a government-funded lab and incubator in Ireland, showed us an silicon impeller that can bring cooled liquids in close contact with chips. The impeller measures a few millimeters across.
The computer, along with a new Power 595 Unix server, sports a 5GHz chip, a speed bump over the existing 4.7GHz versions that have been on the market.
Unix and RISC servers, IBM wants you to know, aren't dead. In 2007, industrywide Unix server revenue grew 1 percent, Mauri said, the first time the market has grown in six years.
IBM also has been aggressively taking share from competitors Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, he added. In five years, IBM has gained 11 percent in market share, according to IDC numbers cited by Mauri, while HP and Sun have lost share.
CORK, Ireland--Researchers for years have devised cooling systems that sit next to or on top of chips and other hot components. Now, researchers in Ireland are trying to make one for inside these components.
The University of Limerick in Ireland, in conjunction with Cork's Tyndall Institute and other research organizations in the country, is working on a liquid cooling system for inside chip packages. Chip packages are those blue/brown plastic sleeves that surround semiconductors and let them plug into a board. When you look at a chip, you're really looking at the package.
Twirly, whirly silicon impeller blades from Ireland.
(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET Networks)In this system, a chilling liquid would circulate in silicon channels and absorb heat as it passes over hot spots. A rotating component (pictured) would circulate the liquid so that it could absorb heat, release the heat away from the component, and re-enter the channels.
The larger rotary impeller you see here is 5 millimeters in diameter, while the smaller one is 2 millimeters. They are made of silicon. (An impeller, by the way, is a propeller for fluids.) The University of Limerick came up with the idea and the intellectual property. Tyndall, which is a national hardware research institute that works with other universities, fabricated the components. Brendan O'Neill, who runs Tyndall's fabrication center, showed it to me on a recent visit.
If they can pull it off, it could mark a distinct improvement in liquid cooling. The closer you can get to the source of the heat, the better a liquid can cool it off. Right now, companies like IBM and Hewlett-Packard sell servers with liquid cooling, but the cooling systems wrap around components. Internal heat, of course, has been one of the big challenges for computer and chip designers.
Next week, Greenest Host in San Diego is going to start offering carbon-free Web services to consumers.
The company plans to start selling Web hosting services for about $14.95 a month. The trick is that its servers and other systems are powered by solar panels or batteries charged by solar panels. In rare instances, a propane-based generator will kick in, but for the most part the services will not contribute greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Solar panels at your service
(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com)The solar-powered server center is the creation of Affordable Internet Services Online (AISO), which has been offering environmentally friendly Web hosting for a few years. AISO mostly serves medium and larger businesses. AISO's basic services cost a little less. Greenest Host gets capacity from AISO, adds a user-friendly interface and other services, and targets different customers.
AISO's building has also been designed to reduce the cooling load in the data center. Cooling can consume half the power in a data center, Fred Stack, vice president of marketing for Emerson, said earlier this year. Emerson makes cooling systems.
Solar power is more expensive than regular grid electricity, concedes Mike Corrales, who founded Greenest Host. "It is definitely more expensive," he said.
To reduce the additional cost, the company, along with AISO, has tried to make the server room and services as energy efficient as possible. The data center relies heavily on virtualization software from VMWare, which allows AISO to get more work per watt for each server. The 600-odd servers run on Opteron chips.
Thus, Greenest Host's services should cost only $1 or $2 more a month, he estimated.
Running a single server on solar power (rather than conventional grid electricity) cuts roughly the same amount of greenhouse gases you would save if you didn't burn 107 gallons of fuel.
Google put in a 1.6MW solar system in its headquarters. It covers about 30 percent of the company's electrical needs at that location. Applied Materials, which makes equipment for the solar industry, is putting up a larger 1.9MW solar system in its Silicon Valley headquarters. (Both of these systems, however, are dwarfed by the 5.2 megawatt solar system Sharp, the largest maker of solar panels, erected at its Kameyama factory in Japan.)
- prev
- 1
- next
