IBM's Aquasar-cooled system goes live in Zurich

In June of last year we wrote about a new water-cooled system that the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich [ETH] and IBM were working on. The new system is called Aquasar, and will directly repurposes excess heat from the computer for university buildings.

According to news at Data Center Knowledge, the 6TF system is now live

IBM logoThe deployment comes a year after ETH and IBM scientists announced plans to collaborate on chip-level water-cooling and energy reuse. The supercomputer, which is now fully operational, consists of special water-cooled IBM BladeCenter Servers designed by IBM scientists in Zurich and Boblingen, Germany. Each of the blades will be equipped with a high-performance liquid cooler on each processor, as well as input and output pipeline networks and connections, which allow each blade to be connected and disconnected easily to the entire system (see photo above). For direct comparison with traditional systems, Aquasar also includes air-cooled BladeCenter servers.

More in the article, along with a video describing how the whole system works.