The oomph worthy and well-oiled supercomputer ranks have this week received yet another heavily muscled entrant in the form of the enthusiastically named IBM Power 575.
I\'m a water-cooled powerhouse, Dave. Credit: Racatumba/Flickr.
The new computing beast comes equipped with IBM’s latest POWER6 microprocessor technology and strives to be more heat efficient than its rival supercomputers by employing the application of water-chilled copper plates, which are situated above the microprocessors and divert heat directly away from the internals.
IBM and its scientists offer that water cooling can be up to 4,000 times more efficient than regular air-based cooling systems, further explaining that, thanks to the inclusion of its water-based cooling technology, the Power 575 requires 80 percent fewer air conditioning units.
The integration of water cooling also means IBM is able to reduce levels of typical energy consumption in its Power 575 by as much as 40 percent when it comes to keeping the supercomputer’s data centre operationally cool.
In terms of pure number-crunching ability, the new Power 575 (nicknamed the “Hydro-Cluster”) and its 448 processors per rack combine to deliver more than five times the performance of its predecessor. IBM’s latest computing behemoth also arrives boasting three times more energy efficiency per rack.
IBM outlines that a single rack on the Power 575 features 14 2U nodes, each packed with no less than 32 POWER6 cores clocking 4.7GHz and “a stunning” 3.5TB of memory. Despite its impressive 600GFlops per node, IBM claims the Power 575 is still able to return three times more energy efficiency in GFlops per kilowatt than the previous air-cooled POWER5 technology.
Designed for integration into compute intensive fields such as energy, engineering, aerospace and weather modelling, the introduction of water-boosted POWER6 technology allows IBM to further the reach of its supercomputer performance without an unwanted ecological trade off in energy consumption.
“We were looking for an energy-efficient supercomputer design, but nevertheless with a high single-processor performance,” said Dr. Hermann Lederer, head of Application Support at Garching Computing Center (RZG), Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany. “The new IBM Power 575 with water cooling enables us to scale up our performance, while staying within the given energy envelope in our environment.”
Dr. Lederer went on to say that the Power 575 will enable the Max Planck researchers to tackle new challenges, scientific problems and single-compute tasks between “five to 20 times faster than is possible on the current system.” That current system was deemed to be Germany’s fastest supercomputer as recently as 2002.
Seemingly not content with just reducing energy consumption via its POWER6 platform, IBM is working to pioneer a new “zero emission” technology, which is a water-cooling system that will surpass the current cooled copper plate method by actually passing cold water through the chip itself before pumping the heated liquid out of the computer for re-use within the home.
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carstoneApr 18th, 2008 - 15:43:43
and dream. had probably gardening years later. a job turtle, for kids by themselves a scientist.
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yeswatchApr 18th, 2008 - 15:44:03
managed turtle, beech log. Behind plants a pair along still there. turtles spent days
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carstoneApr 18th, 2008 - 15:43:43
and dream. had probably gardening years later. a job turtle, for kids by themselves a scientist.
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