DNS - IBM Delivers Supercomputer for ETH Zurich

Ushering in the era of smart energy usage by supercomputers, IBM has delivered a first-of-a-kind hot water-cooled supercomputer to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich). This new energy efficient supercomputer is named Aquasar.

Engaging IBM (News - Alert) scientists with clients to explore and pilot emerging technologies that address business problems, the development of Aquasar began one year ago as part of IBM's First-Of-A-Kind (FOAK) program. The supercomputer consists of special water-cooled IBM BladeCenter Servers. Aquasar also holds additional air-cooled IBM BladeCenter servers for direct comparison with traditional systems. With an energy efficiency of about 450 megaflops per watt, the system achieves a performance of six Teraflops in total.

IBM BladeCenter blade servers support a wide selection of processor technologies and operating systems to allow clients to run all of their diverse workloads inside a single architecture. They reduce complexity, improve systems management, and increase energy efficiency while driving down total cost of ownership.

'With Aquasar we achieved an important milestone on the way to CO2-neutral data centers,' said Dr. Bruno Michel, manager of Advanced Thermal Packaging at IBM Research - Zurich.  'The next step in our research is to focus on the performance and characteristics of the cooling system which will be measured with an extensive system of sensors, in order to optimize it further.'

Recently, IBM had started a three-year collaborative research program called 'Direct use of waste heat from liquid-cooled supercomputers: the path to energy saving, emission-high performance computers and data centers.' Aquasar is part of this program. In addition to ETH Zurich and IBM Research - Zurich, the project also involves ETH Lausanne.

Recently, the company adopted Firefox as its default browser. And with this IBM decision, some 40,000 employees worldwide will use this browser to surf the Internet. The decision came at a time when a number of browsers are vying for attention. Recently Mozilla (News - Alert) informed the industry that the company's software is believed to be used by nearly 400 million people worldwide.

Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raju's articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Patrick Barnard