IBM's super computer goes low power

Is there a poll for the most obvious statement in the world?  Today has a few and they need to be entered.  A personal favourite is VW: “The People Want Better Fuel Economy With No Compromises.”

Another, and one that actually has a genuine application came from the question, ‘how do we cool a top 50 supercomputer without costing the earth running fans?’  The truly obvious answer – stick it somewhere cold.

What better place to build a supercomputer than northern Sweden? Just leave the datacenter’s windows open and Mother Nature can handle the cooling.

IBM made an announcement yesterday at the Top 500 supercomputer conference that the company and Umeå University, based 800 km north of Stockholm, have installed the most powerful Windows-based computer in Europe, called Akka.

The computer can hit bursts of 54tera flops (54 trillion calculations per  second) and as such would normally take a lot to cool it.   As Internetnews.com’s Andy Patrizo put it:

What better place to build a supercomputer than northern Sweden? Just leave the datacenter’s windows open and Mother Nature can handle the cooling.

The supercomputer also uses low power computing technology to give it a power draw of only 50 watts.