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IBM recently unveiled a new supercomputer called Hydro-Cluster that uses water to cool down the device and reduce overall energy consumption. The new Power 575 supercomputer comes equipped with IBM’s latest POWER6 microprocessor.
The system uses water-chilled copper plates above each of its microprocessors that continuously remove heat from the electronics.
IBM researchers say they are also working on computers that would allow water to go directly inside the chip. Once inside, the water can be routed out of the computer and pumped into the heating system for re-use.
According to the company, with this new technology, data centres using Hydro-Cluster supercomputers can reduce their energy consumption by 40 percent and use 80 percent fewer air conditioners. IBM scientists estimate that water can be up to 4,000-times more effective in cooling computer systems than air. The Hydro-Cluster is expected to be available beginning May 6. 
As per the announcement, with 448 processor cores per rack, the new Power 575 offers more than five times the performance of its predecessor, and with advanced water cooling and POWER6 efficiencies, it is three times more energy efficient per rack.
Nicknamed “Hydro-Cluster” the system supports very large clusters – hundreds of nodes -- and enables extreme performance in dense packaging. A single rack features 14 2U nodes, each with 32, 4.7-Ghz cores of POWER6, 3.5 TB of memory, and is more energy efficient than traditional air-cooled designs. At 600 GFlops per node, the Power 575 is three times more energy-efficient in GFlops per kilowatt than the POWER5 generation of air-cooled processors.
"The Power 575, like all POWER-based supercomputers, is designed for the most computationally intensive problems in energy, engineering, aerospace, and weather modelling,” said Dave Jursik, VP of supercomputing sales for IBM.
Looking to the future, IBM scientists at the company's Zurich Research Laboratory recently presented a pioneering concept of a “zero-emission” data centre at CeBIT 2008. A new kind of water-cooling system embedded on a chip is the basis for this exciting innovation that captures the water at its hottest and pipes it off the chip for reuse in heating a building or for hot water.
The IBM Research team is working on the next steps: getting the water even closer to the chip -- not with a copper plate, but actually inside the chip. Then, once captured there, the water can be routed out of the computer and pumped into the heating system for re-use.
The Power 575 supports both AIX – the IBM UNIX operating system -- and Linux, and will be generally available in May.
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