In a public ceremony this week, the Leibnitz Supercomputing Center unveiled SuperMUC the world’s first commercially available hot-water cooled supercomputer. As the fastest system in Europe, SuperMUC will be used to probe the frontiers of medicine, astrophysics and quantum chromodynamics and other scientific disciplines such as computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, life sciences, genome analysis and earth quake simulations.
The SuperMUC will have 147,456 cores and a peak performance of about 3 petaflop/s. The main memory will be 288 terabytes together with 12 petabytes hard disk space based on the GPFS file system. The system will use 18,432 Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge-EP processors running in IBM System x iDataPlex servers. It will also use a new form of cooling that IBM developed, called Aquasar, that uses hot water to cool the processors, a design that should cut cooling electricity usage by 40 percent, IBM claims.
Update: IBM Research Director Matthias Kaiserswerth blogged this weekend about why the SuperMUC machine is an amazing technological achievement.