IBM Deploys Hot-Water Cooled Supercomputer 112
MrSeb writes "With the ISC (International Supercomputer Conference) kicking off this week, there's been a flurry of announcements around new supercomputer buildouts. One of the more interesting systems debuting this week is SuperMUC — IBM's new supercomputer at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center in Germany IBM is billing SuperMUC as the first 'hot-water cooled supercomputer,' an advance it claims cut power consumption by 40%. Dubbed Aquasar, the new system looks like any standard water cooler: water is pumped in one side of the blade, circulates throughout the system, and is pumped out. The difference, according to IBM, are the microchannels etched into the copper heatblock above the CPU cores. Rather than simply being dumped, SuperMUC's waste heat is designed to be converted into building heat during winter. Presumably it is mostly radiated away in summer, rather than being dumped into the offices of angry German scientists."
microchannels? (Score:1)
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CURSE YOU!
*shakes tiny fist*
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BMO
A laundry shop on the side ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Laundry shops need a lot of very hot water to "cook" the dirty linen that they receive everyday
Almost all laundry shops are using water heaters - whether they be electric powered water heaters or gas-burner powered water heaters - to heat up the water
Here's my proposal:
On the side of all super-computer center or any large scale data-center the authority should draw up a special "zone" for laundry shops
That way, all the hot water generated from the computers will be put to good use - without any additional wastage of precious energy resource
It's kinda fits into the "Go Green" concept that is so popular these days
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Japanese baths.
Great, big, Japanese baths.
Think about it!
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BMO
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There's one big problem
If you get a Japanese Bath (with beautiful Japanese ladies enjoying their baths) on the side of a super-computer center or data-center, who will man the data-center?
All the geeks from the data-center will flock to join the Japanese ladies in the Japanese Bath
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Not to mention all the additives that will go into the water, unless you are planning to have a separate water supply and system that transfers the heat between them.
The perk for using it as a heat source for a HVAC system is that the circuit doesn't need to be open, unless you want to breath fluid. My college has a system like this for their server rooms and all the floors. If memory serves me right, they supply heating to only half of the building at a time (north or south), because of the way the sun hit
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I breathe fluid all the time :)
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All the geeks from the data-center will flock to join the Japanese ladies in the Japanese Bath
And even with the ladies already naked I fear the geeks still got no shot....
How about building REALLY SMART Hot Dog carts? With that much hot water we could have ever conceivable version of tube steak hot and ready to go.
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All the geeks from the data-center will flock to join the Japanese ladies in the Japanese Bath
And even with the ladies already naked I fear the geeks still got no shot.... How about building REALLY SMART Hot Dog carts? With that much hot water we could have ever conceivable version of tube steak hot and ready to go.
Hot dog carts were banned in my town as a result of the G-string clad cart employees causing many automobile accidents.
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I am in the process of redoing my A/C so that I use a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger ( tube-in-tube; actually mechanized as a length of copper tubing in a rubber hose ) so I can take advantage of the approx 60 deg F city water.
I figure if I am going to irrigate, the plants won't mind it at all if I warm it to about 85-90F. The refrigeration loop runs on propane - plain old barbeque gas no less. As a refrigerant, not a fuel.
The main concern I have had is the refrigerant loop
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beaming the heat to deep space
I don't think solar panel can beam heat into deep space
Re:A laundry shop on the side ? (Score:4, Interesting)
I notice my car gets wet from condensation. Its "beaming" its thermal energy off into the night sky - just as it will accept energy from the sun during the day, becoming quite hot.
I figure if I am streaming 90 degree water into a solar collector at night, it may cool it off to 80 degrees or so - especially if I combine it with evaporative cooling.
Its the typical "it gets cold at night" thing.
If you were in outer space with an infrared detector over my house at night, you should see my solar collector "lit up".
The idea is I have a lot of BTU I want to get rid of in my quest to liquefy propane gas at high pressure. I can heat up air ( conventional method of doing it ), or transfer the heat to a cooler mass, ( water in my case ), evaporate water with it, and I want to experiment to see how much BTU I can radiate with a standard solar collector panel ( the ones with liquid channels ).
I would like to experiment with standard PV panels bonded onto liquid-channel panels so that during the day, the PV makes electricity, while the liquid panels not only cool the PV array, but provide preheat for a 100 gallon water tank.
Fluid circulation pumps will route water from the tank, through the collector, then back to the tank as long as collector temperature exceeds tank temperature.
Of course, once the sun sets, the panel is no longer experiences an influx of about 1KW/m^2 solar energy.
At night, it will cool off and become quite cold all by itself as it faces the night sky. That's when I am going to attempt to heat the panel back up by circulating water used to cool the propane exchanger ( condenser ). I see it as about 100 square foot of blackbody radiator. What I want is some practical experience on how many BTU I can get rid of doing it this way, as the circulator pumps draw much less energy than the fans required to move the air in a liquid-air exchanger.
I already have an aluminum roof. That thing gets so cold during the summer I have been having a problem with condensation causing mildew problems. Despite outside air temps of 80-90 F. For condensation to form, the roof has to drop below dew point temperature, and judging from how fast I am condensing liquid water from the air, I get a gut feeling I am already beaming out quite a lot of heat.
So, in a sense, I am "beaming" the energy to deep space just as a light bulb "beams" the energy of its heated filament into a dark room.
By far, the most practical is to simply evaporative cool the system... but what if water is not freely available ( design for the Middle East. ).
That is what I liked about your post. You saw the heat being generated in a server farm, and noted it was just the right temperature for use in a laundromat. A helluva lot of BTU that could have been used - wasted. If more people had your mindset, we could enjoy our creature comforts without paying twice for energy. It simply doesn't make sense to waste things.
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Right now, I live in a area without much temperature extremes, and close proximity to industrial supply houses.
After I get enough empirical data, and a good gut feeling of how to make this work, or if it will, I will then go somewhere like Arizona, New Mexico, or Texas to implement it large scale.
( Incidentally, the pressures aren't much higher than that found in a barbeque bottle left in the sun. Albeit I do have more piping and repurposed junk
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Getting rid of excessive heat is to be done by reusing it, not by loosing it into space (or more likely the atmosphere).
You write about the oil price, the installation of original article is positioned in Germany, one of the many countries that is seriously worried about an irrevocable human effect on the climate also know as the green house effect.
So Germany has like all other EU countries decided to promote renewable energy and best practis
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... use solar collectors in reverse at night to get rid of heat...
I'm fairly certain you can. Do you have one of those contactless IR thermometers? Point it at a clear blue sky - it'll read way below zero (F or C). You're reading the effective temp of the atmosphere up to space, and the efficiency of your radiator is proportional to the temperature difference. If you point it at the base of an overhead cloud, it reads much higher.
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All hotels have air conditioning equipment which generates waste heat.
They also have laundries and guest hot water which need a lot of heat.
How stupid not to combine them?
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All hotels have air conditioning equipment which generates waste heat.
They also have laundries and guest hot water which need a lot of heat.
How stupid not to combine them?
There is no financial incentive for the hoteliers
If there exists a law that incentivizes small and medium business enterprises to re-use the excess heat they generate, I'm sure many would make the necessary changes
Actually, a similar law has already been in effect for decades for heavy industries - factories that generate excess heat were encouraged to generate electricity and then sell the electricity to the power company
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Does it come with Reference USB Keys?
Sadly, I don't think anyone else reading slashdot was alive during the Micro-Channel era, let alone gets the joke ....
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what about cooking oil?
What about it?
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I think the GP meant running cooking oil through the system instead of hot water, and then use the hot oil to fry stuff that the scientiests want to eat. That would be useful both summer & winter.
On a different note, I wonder - why not have some of these supercomputers built and installed in some of the world's coldest places - say Fairbanks, AK, or within Russia, the 2 North Poles of Cold [wikipedia.org] - Verkhoyansk or Oymyakon. Another idea for a good location would be Svalbard Islands in Norway, just off the A
I never understood server room cooling (Score:3, Interesting)
Hot and cold isn't that hard. Maybe I am missing a point somewhere.
You take the heat energy biproduct from a processor and dump it somewhere else. In "normal" this case, an air conditioned room. Heat dissipated is being countered by air conditioning going 24/7. More energy.
Instead of watercooling, which can refrigerate a fluid (more energy in put and unusable for anything else), this removes waste heat and reuses it elsewhere.
This isn't going to work but... Instead of sitting in the tub and pissing in it continuously, your waste is being used somewhere else. (This is Germany after all)
Has anyone ever tested if we actually need air conditioning for a server room? I mean transform one into a "wind tunnel" where the waste heat is either ejected outside or used internally? Instead of a giant cube... what about a rectangle?
Will this lead to.. yo dawg I heard you like blades so we made your rack of blades into a blade?
Re:I never understood server room cooling (Score:5, Insightful)
You ever try working in a server room when the a/c is broken? In southern California? In the middle of summer? It gets unpleasant. Quickly. And when it's 110 outside, you cannot simply pipe in outside air to cool the place. a/c is also for the server admins, not just the hardware. I'd venture to guess than the equipment will fail long after I have when the place gets a bit roasty.
Re:I never understood server room cooling (Score:5, Interesting)
He didn't say "just get rid of AC". He was wondering if you designed the shape of the room where it has a constant draft. That way, the heat is cycled out of the building and cool air is pulled in from the other side. If you had a sever room that was 10 feet wide and 200 feet long, you could have one heck of a wind tunnel effect.
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The hard part is where do you pull FROM. If it's like the poster said and 100+ outside, you're 'cooling' your servers with 100 degree air, and it's a convection oven for everyone inside that room.
If you're pulling in the air from an air conditioned part of the building, you're just 'stealing' cold air from that part of the building and pulling it through your servers; you're also losing a lot of that cold air around the servers unless you isolate your hot/cold sides like some colo facilities do. Now we're
Re:I never understood server room cooling (Score:5, Insightful)
The hard part is where do you pull FROM. If it's like the poster said and 100+ outside, you're 'cooling' your servers with 100 degree air,
If the surface temp of your CPU is 160-200F, then cooling it with 100F air will work fine. You still have a delta-T of 60-100F. Computers do not need to be cooled with air that feels cool to a human. If the air temp is warm, it is usually much cheaper to increase the flow rate than to cool the incoming air.
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Assuming all parts could handle the 100 degree air and the pressure that would be required. The room would be hell on earth with insane wind speeds, definitely a convection oven.
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Assuming all parts could handle the 100 degree air and the pressure that would be required. The room would be hell on earth with insane wind speeds, definitely a convection oven.
Do your maintenance at night, or early morning. In SoCal summer daytime temps are 100F+, but at night the temps are in the 70s.
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Air is just a shovel for moving the heat away. Cooling the air just makes the shovel bigger so it can sit ther
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Where I am there is about month or two each year when the maximum outside temperature is lower than the 22C I have the server room set to. On the other hand, if it was a bigger room I could put an industrial sized solar airconditioning unit because there's a lot of sunshine here even in midwinter.
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I wonder if you can get enough "pressure" to pull the air though a direct evap cooler (DEC, Swamp cooler) before making it to the servers. There are many many places in this world were the humidity is low enough to make this work every day all day if you can accept 95-100F air into the servers, even when it is 120F outside.
The bigger issue is not how to cool the air, but all the shit in the outside air. getting the air though filters and then the DEC with enough flow to make it work at 100F usually means a
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What If you build a server room that's either centered around a vertical pipe, or shaped as your long and narrow design, but adding an uphill gradient? Maybe instead of a constant slope, you could start off flat at the intake end, and end up swooping upwards?
On the other hand, how much of a problem is a constant stiff breeze in a server room? You could get a lot of cooling with a constant 35 Kph vertical wind, but can your techs work in one?
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You could still cool the servers with treated outside air (or 110deg water or whatever). You then insulate the server racks and cool the room with conventional AC. The trick then is that the AC only needs to handle the heat from the servers that leaks through the insulation rather than the power being dissipated by the servers.
The Slashdot that was ... (Score:3)
... is no more
When Slashdot was brand new - trust me, I was there - there was very few racist post, and there was no "mcpc" spams either
Sigh !!
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Slashdot has become a bad habit. The wife you fuck because it's better than doing without. The car with a slow puncture. The onion in a bag of apples.
Don't feed the trolls. They're fat and need to lose weight.
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Search for "free cooling" and you will get the answers for your questions.
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Too moist? Servers will happily work with 95% humidity as long as it doesn't condense (which is easy as the server will heat the air and thus lower the RH), when it is cool out there is no reason to evaporate water to cool the air.
(Yes I plot it on a psych chart if you would like).
Lots of data centers are going to air side when the outside air will allow, and using other cooling methods when the air is too moist. This gives you more site flexability will still taking advantage of the "free cooling" with out
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Has anyone ever tested if we actually need air conditioning for a server room?
You do need "air conditioning", since you do want to make sure the air is not too dirty or humid or dry or hot.
But yes you can do without conventional data center air conditioning:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150148003778920&_fb_noscript=1 [facebook.com]
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/the-facebook-data-center-faq-newest-page/ [datacenterknowledge.com]
They're also trying in a warmer more humid area:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/04/facebook-data-center-2/ [wired.com]
Wonder how well that will work.
Power efficiency is the key (Score:2)
The problem with simply "dumping the waste heat" somewhere is that you need to find a place where to dump it. As the story indicated, this is not so much a problem in winter, but in summer, when no one wants your heat (no offices b/c sweat
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There is some company, whose name I of course forget at the moment, that is building a building aligned with the local persistent winds so that it does create a type of wind funnel affect. (That was the most awkward sentence I've ever constructed.) Somewhere in the northern midwest US, I think, maybe.
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Yes, data center cooling has been studied extensively. Consider a typical data center with 5,000 square feet of server space, and wired for 145 watt-hours/sq ft. That center is drawing about 3/4 megawatts per hour. You don't just "guess" when you already know you have to get rid of 2.5 million BTUs of waste heat. You have to carefully plan the thermal flow through the data center to ensure the whole building doesn't simply cook itself in its own waste. That means using a combination of ambient air, wat
Related News: (Score:2, Troll)
In related news, the UN Security Council has scheduled the start of WW3 to coincide with the 5 year anniversary of SuperMUC's online-date, pending the lack of adequate air-conditioning in the angry German scientists' offices.
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Angry scientists? (Score:5, Funny)
On top of that, heated offices will make the German scientists think they're in Mallorca or Costa del Sol and they'll be partying all day and night to the hot techno beats.
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If the cooling water comes out hot enough, it can also be used to heat the building's water supply. Or at least it can be used to help out, e.g. keeping the water in the pipes warm.
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Seen on Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
"Tracking" (Score:2)
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Yeah, I think the last time we dealt with the products of angry German scientists, it didn't go well.
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I never thought that somebody that has never heard of Einstein would be able to find their way to this site.
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Yeah, I think the last time we dealt with the products of angry German scientists, it didn't go well.
Well, their products got us to the moon and back. Maybe if we turn up the water temperature, they will produce some again?
Does anyone know how hot the Chinese keep their scientists? It must be pretty high, considering China's recent achievements in space.
"Yo! Turn on the supercomputer, and hose down the scientists! We're all going into outer space!"
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Yeah, Einstein and the Manhattan Project...
Might be storing the heat (Score:5, Interesting)
"Rather than simply being dumped, SuperMUC's waste heat is designed to be converted into building heat during winter. Presumably it is mostly radiated away in summer"
They might be storing the heat rather than dumping it in the summer.
We are building a meat processing facility. Meat processing facilities use a lot of energy for heating water, cooling carcasses, freezing and general storage & air conditioning. To reduce our energy needs we're storing winter in thermal mass so that we can use it during the warm seasons. We're also using the 'waste heat' from our refrigeration compressors to heat water in addition to solar hot water and the backup of propane heating for the water. All of this will save us enormous amounts of money since we won't have to buy as much energy. Good for our carbon foot print and even better for our bottom line as more money will stay in our pockets rather than being dumped into the environment. IBM could do the same.
See http://sugarmtnfarm.com/butchershop [sugarmtnfarm.com]
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The problem with the ice slush pond is two fold:
1) they're in contact with the soil which limits the lower temperature due to ground heat. The economics of insulating the bottom of a pond this difficult.
2) they're not going down to as low a temperature as we can with the saline batteries. Salt solutions freeze at a much lower temperature. For the pond they want to shoot the ice water out over the slopes when this is used as ski areas. For environmental considerations salt water ponds are frowned on in most
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Shh... don't reveal our future technology projects! And rest assured, we've almost got the radiation levels of the ribeye down to acceptable levels post cooking in the collider. :)
Warm water cooling makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
My university building is 80m from SuperMUC; there is a large campus at the site with several thousand students and employees. In winter it most definitely makes sense to use the heat from SuperMUC, as the average temperature is about 0 degrees Celsius. In summer it might be a bit more difficult to dissipate heat on hot days, though the average temperature is still only 19 decrees Celsius for July.
Water cooled overclocks have been heating homes. (Score:2)
This is very simple water cooling. The principle is identical to what is found in high end overclocked systems.
Your coolant only needs to be cooler than the core itself to remove heat. It's been known for a long time that dumping the heat of an overclocked system into a room through a water loop will heat said room.
Even in the dead of winter when it's 0C outside, my *one* overclocked computer can keep my 300SQ ft room heated to above 70 degrees with no additional heat sources.
News? I guess. Definitely a
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Non-overclocked air cooled systems also heat the room. This article is about heating rooms that the computer isn't in.
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The very rough idea is obvious. Going through the specifics of instrumenting a facility, of determining what the acceptable temperature and flow rate are to keep cpu die temperature at an acceptable level (note, if your cpu is still kicking, that may not be enough, voltage leakage increases with temperature, meaning power draw goes up, and you are being inefficient by letting the die get *too* hot. Also, this is the fastest x86 based system in the world. In part because the cooling is adequate to let the
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No, the coolant does not just need to be cooler than the core itself. It has to also be able to absorb heat faster than the core is generating it. This means that all the thermal resistances in the path must be accounted for. Usually this means that the coolant temperature must be MUCH lower than the core, which requires chilling the coolant. The difference with this system is that the incoming water temperature does not need to be particularly cool - it can be 45C/113F, which means it takes less cooli
Been there, done that (Score:2)
Respect the H2O (Score:4, Interesting)
People need to understand and respect just how awesome water is as a coolant. The specific heat of the stuff (basically, how much heat you can 'sink' into a gram of it) and its benign, well-understood nature, and the fact that its density only changes a little bit between freezing and boiling points make it quite awesome.
I live in a city with a river through it. I really don't know why they aren't doing cooling via air-to-water heat pumps. It's really absurd to blow fans all day when the river could carry away 100X the heat without too many ill effects.
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I live in a city with a river through it. I really don't know why they aren't doing cooling via air-to-water heat pumps. It's really absurd to blow fans all day when the river could carry away 100X the heat without too many ill effects.
Except for maybe killing most the marine life :P
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It's complicated (Score:3, Informative)
Water can be a b***h to use in a closed-loop cooling system. If it has any appreciable electrical conductivity, you get electrolytic corrosion of different metals in the cooling loop. If you use 18 megohm DI water, you get corrosion for other reasons. Depending on whether you have exposure to air (like in an evaporative cooling tower), you get bacterial and algal blooms, dirt, dust, pigeon poop - it's not as simple as "pump the water around in a circle and move the heat with it". Many closed loop water cool
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Closed-loop, ground-source heat-pumps are a bit more efficient than an open-loop water-source like you describe, and there's no concern about turning your cool and clear pristine rivers into a warm, stagnant swamp devoid of animal life.
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Use it for hot water too? (Score:3)
It would be trivial to upgrade 45C water to e.g. 60C with a heat pump. This could be done with high efficiency, certainly COP > 3. Of course an office building might not need that much hot water in summer (maybe for showers for those who bike to work?), but other buildings nearby might. Or use it for district heating, if they have that in the area, but with existing systems that would probably require more like 70C.
Or just get the CPU's running at 300C, of course. Then you could run a steam turbine on the coolant...
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Yawn... (Score:4, Informative)
Decades ago Cray heated their building in Mendota Heights Minnesota entirely using waste heat from the supercomputers. When they built their new campus a few miles away and sold the old building they had to go through some amount of trouble to retrofit it with heating from conventional fuels.
What's old is new again.