Supercomputers the size of sugar cubes

Zurich, Switzerland, 1 Mar 2011—Energy consumption poses a critical challenge in the development of next-generation supercomputers and IT systems. Within the next 10 years, IBM scientists and developers aim to build computers featuring exascale computing performance, but with an absolute energy consumption that is not much higher than that of today's largest systems. Exascale computers are capable of reaching a performance of one ExaFLOP/s, which corresponds to 10¹⁸ floating point operations per second. This is about 300 times faster than today's fastest supercomputer. New water-cooling technologies that wick off heat right where it is being generated—directly at the chip—offer a promising route to boost significantly the overall energy efficiency of computers. At this year's CeBIT, IBM is presenting its first so-called hot-water-cooled systems, which will provide a sneak preview of future innovations: Supercomputers the size of sugar cubes. First successful projects Cooling with hot water combines several advantages: It eliminates the need for energy-intensive coolers, which greatly reduces overall energy consumption.