Do SuperComputers Turn a Green Data Center Gray?
• Green data center technology and supercomputing aren’t two things that go well together, and there’s a reason why. Faster computational performance in a densely packed space requires the hottest – literally – CPUs available packed very close together. All that heat requires somewhere to go, which requires cooling and more dollars to the power bill. Exhibit A for this is IBM’s Blue Waters supercomputer being built at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus, as reported by News.com. The machine is getting its own 88,000 square foot building and be theoretically capable of speeds of 10 petaflops, about 10 times as fast as the fastest supercomputer today. Blue Waters will use lots and lots of brand new IBM Power7 processors expected out in the first half of 2010 – a total of 16,384 chips together. Each Power7 processor integrates eight processing cores in one chip package and each core can in turn execute four tasks, so net-net each chip can perform 32 separate operations at o
• Green data center technology and supercomputing aren’t two things that go well together, and there’s a reason why. Faster computational performance in a densely packed space requires the hottest – literally – CPUs available packed very close together. All that heat requires somewhere to go, which requires cooling and more dollars to the power bill. Exhibit A for this is IBM’s Blue Waters supercomputer being built at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus, as reported by News.com. The machine is getting its own 88,000 square foot building and be theoretically capable of speeds of 10 petaflops, about 10 times as fast as the fastest supercomputer today. Blue Waters will use lots and lots of brand new IBM Power7 processors expected out in the first half of 2010 – a total of 16,384 chips together. Each Power7 processor integrates eight processing cores in one chip package and each core can in turn execute four tasks, so net-net each chip can perform 32 separate operations at o
