WesM63
02-09-2003, 11:42 PM
While i was doing some research for a science project (F@H) I stumbled upon "Blue gene" a 1petaflop (1,000 teraflops) supercomputer which is supposed to be finished in 2004. While reading I stumbled upon this....
Then there's power supply. The simple processors with embedded memory are abstemious when it comes to their appetite for power; Blue Gene will need less than a twentieth as much per flop as a conventional system. Even so, with a million cores on some 25,000 chips, Blue Gene is expected to need a more than 1.5-megawatt electricity supply - enough for about 400 homes - and could easily end up needing more.
The chips will turn that energy into waste heat, which will have to be taken away by a constant stream of cooling water flowing through little copper heat sinks under every chip on every board. Water cooling means extra hassle - a tank in the lab's basement will provide the 1,000 gallons per minute required, and there will have to be a system of drip trays set up under the computer to catch leaks (the engineers, says Pulleyblank, call them gene pools). But it also means the chips will run at lower temperatures - and thus run better - than they would if the system relied on air cooling. And it makes things more comfortable for the staff: Denneau literally shivers at the memory of sharing his working space with the perpetual gale needed to rid GF11 of one-quarter of a megawatt of waste heat.
Water cooling also makes it easier for the stacks to be stuck right next to each other. This is the best solution from the computer's point of view, because it lets the machine's 100,000 interconnecting cables transfer data from stack to stack quickly. Running a supercomputer is like administering a galactic empire: The big problem is that you can never really be up-to-date with what's afoot in the provinces. Getting information all the way from one end of the machine to the other would take more than a microsecond, which corresponds to more than 500 cycles for the chips
Here (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.07/blue.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=) is the rest of the article. Just thought i'd post it since the majority of us are liquid cooled. :D
Then there's power supply. The simple processors with embedded memory are abstemious when it comes to their appetite for power; Blue Gene will need less than a twentieth as much per flop as a conventional system. Even so, with a million cores on some 25,000 chips, Blue Gene is expected to need a more than 1.5-megawatt electricity supply - enough for about 400 homes - and could easily end up needing more.
The chips will turn that energy into waste heat, which will have to be taken away by a constant stream of cooling water flowing through little copper heat sinks under every chip on every board. Water cooling means extra hassle - a tank in the lab's basement will provide the 1,000 gallons per minute required, and there will have to be a system of drip trays set up under the computer to catch leaks (the engineers, says Pulleyblank, call them gene pools). But it also means the chips will run at lower temperatures - and thus run better - than they would if the system relied on air cooling. And it makes things more comfortable for the staff: Denneau literally shivers at the memory of sharing his working space with the perpetual gale needed to rid GF11 of one-quarter of a megawatt of waste heat.
Water cooling also makes it easier for the stacks to be stuck right next to each other. This is the best solution from the computer's point of view, because it lets the machine's 100,000 interconnecting cables transfer data from stack to stack quickly. Running a supercomputer is like administering a galactic empire: The big problem is that you can never really be up-to-date with what's afoot in the provinces. Getting information all the way from one end of the machine to the other would take more than a microsecond, which corresponds to more than 500 cycles for the chips
Here (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.07/blue.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=) is the rest of the article. Just thought i'd post it since the majority of us are liquid cooled. :D