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 Aquasar  

Aquasar is a Supercomputer system produced by IBM which revolutionizes water cooling by using hot water instead of any of the conventional methods in use today. Aquasar consumes up to 40% less energy than a comparable air-cooled system through a direct re-use of the heat produced and liquid cooling.

Switching to liquid cooling has two large advantages :


 * The energy that is consumed is reduced because the system only requires energy to pump the liquid around the pipe setup and for reading the temperature. The need to supply high amounts of power for chiller and cooling equipment to cool the air before it enters the system is negated.
 * The heat can be captured by an exchanger and then used for other purposes.

Aquasar is built with the second point as a premise and captures the heat and heats the ETH Zurich instead of just wasting the heat.

History
Research and development of Aquasar began five years ago as a part of IBM's FOAK program which focuses on using emerging technology to fix business problems. IBM research and LTNT group in Zurich joined together to reduced the carbon footprint of supercomputers.

Design
The current Aquasar system consists of 33 IBM BladeCenter QS22 PowerXCell and 9 IBM BladeCenter HS22 Intel Nehalem equally distributed in 3 IBM BladeCenter H Chassis with 14 BladeCenters in each chassis all of which release massive amounts of heat that is then captured. The system uses tiny capillary micro-channels to feed the water thorugh the IBM servers to cool and collect the heat; which ends being released elsewhere. For the current model that has been implemented the collected heat ends up being released into the building heating system at the ETH Zurich with the purpose of providing heat and warmth to the occupants at no extra charge.



The Schematics of the current cooling loop are shown in Fig. 2 and they explain how the process is carried out. First point of note is that the air cooled electric components are kept separate from those that are liquid cool in order to maximize the efficiency of heat capture. And since Aquasar is a project upon the liquid cooled components, it is important to focus on them. The liquid flows through the pipes indicated in green and captire the heat from all of the components of the servers and computers; this heat is then exchanged to the pipe system shown in blue which works to the send the liquid through the architecture and distribute the heat. In effectiveness, cooling the liquid and heating the environment outside of the components room. There is also another change that takes place, sending part of the heated water to the infrastructure indicated by red which in turn sends the water heat to be used for specific undisclosed processes.

The pipelines from the cooling blades link to larger setups of servers racks, which reroute to the main water transportation system. The water-cooled supercomputer requires about 10 liters of water for cooling and a flow rate of 30 liters per minute must be achieved.

Six Teraflop System
Aquasar achieves a performance of six FLOPS and provides energy efficiency of about 450 megaflops per watt. Upon that, the system recirculates and feeds 9 kilowatts of thermal energy back into ETH Zurich's heating system.

Aquasar features a system composed of chip-level coolig with a water temperature of 60 degrees C that work to keep the chip at optimal temperature and well below the max of 85 degrees C. The specturm of input of the coolant results in higher-grade output heat of about 65 degrees C. In contrast, traditional centers use water temperatures of an average 8.33 C to cool air for center cooling.

The Back-Up Cooling Loop
Aquasar introduced the intermediate loop with the purpose of supplying the system with cold water in case of failure of the primary loop or overheating. This intermediate loop overlays the mainframe and if needed would exchange the heat and send it outside of the premises of the location for immediate dispersion with the intention of reducing any damage chance. Having this control of the hot water flow through the back-up heat exchanger helps control the heat flow and maintains a constant inlet temperature to the cold side.