Energy Usage and Heat Management
See also: Computer cooling and Green 500A typical supercomputer consumes large amounts of electrical power, almost all of which is converted into heat, requiring cooling. For example, Tianhe-1A consumes 4.04 Megawatts of electricity. The cost to power and cool the system can be significant, e.g. 4MW at $0.10/KWh is $400 an hour or about $3.5 million per year.
Heat management is a major issue in complex electronic devices, and affects powerful computer systems in various ways. The thermal design power and CPU power dissipation issues in supercomputing surpass those of traditional computer cooling technologies. The supercomputing awards for green computing reflect this issue.
The packing of thousands of processors together inevitably generates significant amounts of heat density that need to be dealt with. The Cray 2 was liquid cooled, and used a Fluorinert "cooling waterfall" which was forced through the modules under pressure. However, the submerged liquid cooling approach was not practical for the multi-cabinet systems based on off-the-shelf processors, and in System X a special cooling system that combined air conditioning with liquid cooling was developed in conjunction with the Liebert company.
In the Blue Gene system IBM deliberately used low power processors to deal with heat density. On the other hand, the IBM Power 775, released in 2011, has closely packed elements that require water cooling. The IBM Aquasar system, on the other hand uses hot water cooling to achieve energy efficiency, the water being used to heat buildings as well.
The energy efficiency of computer systems is generally measured in terms of "FLOPS per Watt". In 2008 IBM's Roadrunner operated at 376 MFLOPS/Watt. In November 2010, the Blue Gene/Q reached 1684 MFLOPS/Watt. In June 2011 the top 2 spots on the Green 500 list were occupied by Blue Gene machines in New York (one achieving 2097 MFLOPS/W) with the DEGIMA cluster in Nagasaki placing third with 1375 MFLOPS/W.
Read more about this topic: Supercomputer, Hardware and Architecture
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