Engineers Hunt for Ways to Cool Computing
A laptop computer can double as an effective portable knee-warmer -- pleasant in a cold office. But a bigger desktop machine needs a fan. A data center as large as those used by Google needs a high-volume flow of cooling water. And with cutting-edge supercomputers, the trick is to keep them from melting. A world-class machine at the Leibniz Supercomputing center in Munich, for example, operates at 3 petaflops (3 × 10 15 operations per second), and the heat it produces warms some of the center's buildings. Current trends suggest that the next milestone in computing -- an exaflop machine performing at 10 18 flops -- would consume hundreds of megawatts of power (equivalent to the output of a small nuclear plant) and turn virtually all of that energy into heat. [More]