Aquasar

Aquasar is the name of a pilot project for the cooling of computers by means of warm water. The project is IBM performs in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich ( ETH). The first supercomputer with this cooling system was put into operation on May 6, 2010. The Leibniz-Rechenzentrum in Garching near Munich weitereres system is operated based on Aquasar with the SuperMUC. SuperMUC is the current fastest supercomputer in Europe (June 2012).

The aim is to cool the computer data center with water and use the resulting recovered heat energy for heating buildings or even for energy recovery.

In order to fully utilize the thermal energy output to heat the building, the water used to cool the CPUs already has a temperature of 60 ° C. The energy for heating the water is also carried through the cooling process. To maintain adequate cooling of the computer is guaranteed with this temperature at a permissible maximum processor temperature of 85 ° C anyway.

Through this system of datacenter power consumption by up to 40 percent and CO2 emissions by up to 85 percent should be reduced.