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.
Remember the panic when the first computer worm hit? We're going to have a crisis like that next year when we get the first data center meltdown, predicted Subodh Bapat, a vice president in the eco-computing team at Sun Microsystems.
"You'll see a massive failure in a year," Bapat said at a dinner with reporters on Monday. "We are going to see a data center failure of that scale."
"That scale" referred to the problems caused by the worm created by Cornell grad student Robert Morris Jr. in 1988. His worm infected about 5 percent of the Unix boxes on the Internet, freaked people out, and helped jump-start the security industry.
Of course, it's just a prediction, so there is no guarantee that it will happen. But it does seem possible. Data centers have mushroomed with the flood of processes and jobs being turned over to the Internet. Companies have built up their data centers, but even with technologies like virtualization it's been tough to keep up. At some point, a data center is going to crash and people are going to go spastic.
On a more cheery note, Bapat and other Sun executives said that the IT industry is also on the verge of a construction boom that, if it happens, will lead to big orders for equipment for makers of servers, storage systems, and other data center equipment.
The typical life span of a data center is only about 10 to 12 years, said the Sun executives. Thus, a lot of those data centers built at the beginning of the dot-com era need to be rebuilt. Other companies like Facebook are expanding rapidly as well. (Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos mentioned Facebook several times, so it sounds like maybe Sun is working with, or trying to work with, them. Just a thought.)
National labs and universities are also looking at new centers. Next year, one of the national labs has plans to build a data center that will take up 500,000 square feet and consume 50 megawatts. (Big data centers now take up 400,000 square feet and chew up 40 megawatts, Sun executives said.)
Other organizations are looking at 50-megawatt to 70-megawatt data centers.
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