IBM's Big Plumbing Job
Category: CPU CoolingPosted: April 9, 2008 07:12AM
Author: Nemo
And you thought your water cooling setup was a challenge. How do you keep 448 processing cores cool without incurring a massive air conditioning bill? That's the problem IBM faced with its new Power 575 Supercomputer. With all those Power6 processors running at 4.7GHz, IBM had to find a better way than air to cool this massive machine. Instead, IBM engineers created a grid overlay system that places copper plates above each processor and using chilled water to remove the heat from the processor and from the rack where it is cooled again and reused. This setup results in a 40% reduction in power demand due to reduced cooling requirements for the data center. IBM has said it expects this type of cooling setup to eventually evolve into one where the water cooling is integrated right into the chip itself.
