New Supercomputer Uses Generated Heat to Warm Surrounding Spaces-

Computers and green don’t usually coincide with one another, as normal workstations suck up massive amounts of electricity to process; although IBM is working to change the norm by releasing a new supercomputer which uses water to draw off surplus heat and utilizes the leftover energy to warm surrounding spaces. The supercomputer, properly called Aquasar, was co-developed by experts at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and features a top speed of ten teraflops – one trillion floating-point operations per second. That is massive processing capacity for standard computers, although it’s actually only a small fraction of the speed of most supercomputers around today. While it may not be completely green, the company claims that the technology involved may lead to a decrease in complete energy consumption by at least 40 percent and save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide a year when weighed against comparable air-cooled computer machines. As well as its energy saving features, the heat generated by the supercomputer will be used to pipe into the building’s heating system. Being a small 25 kilowatt system, it will only serve a small portion of the building’s overall energy needs but researchers assert that future developments are promising. “Energy is arguably the number one challenge humanity will be facing in the 21st century… We cannot afford anymore to design computer systems based on the criterion of computational speed and performance alone,” stated Dimos Poulikakos, lead investigator of the project. The Aquasar supercomputer will be housed at ETH and is projected to begin providing heat energy to the campus in 2010.