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

The Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ), in collaboration with 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.

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.

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  Science & Technology

[Lilsyn89]

....not hot water cooled......how can they say its hot water cooled.....it shows in the video that COLD water is sent through the channels to the processors/servers and then sent out to heat the other buildings/rooms. This is simply an idea to heat other things with the heat generated from the supercomputer. Not Hot water cooled....misleading title too.

[IBMLabs]

thanks for your comment. The BLUE color is not representing COLD water it represents water. In addition, as stated in the lower left corner of the animation, it is based on a prior design and not specific to SuperMUC. Here is a paper in the journal Science that explains how the hot water cools the system: Science (print ISSN 0036-8075; online ISSN 1095-9203)

[delta6326]

This would be my dream job building servers.

[Lars Eppinger]

there will not be a leak :) And I thgonk they are using destilated water, which does not lead (sry if it's wrong i'm german...) electricity, so that no damage will be taken and that it can be fixed immediately

[Lars Eppinger]

so to say haha xD

[dekonfrost7]

$3 million dollars worth..sorry.

[dekonfrost7]

Still cost a lot more than that Indian who bought 3 million Mac g5 and strung them together.

[CosmoTaylor]

I bet they get 10000 fps on battlefeild 3 on max

[itsdglad4]

That's an awesome idea, use the heat generated to supply homes. Go Germany!

[Michel lee]

Can it run farmville?

[Michel lee]

Now that people is just Chuck Norris Tamagotchi

[timedragon1]

So where can I get mine?

[falcon02012]

What if there's a leak!!!!!!!!!