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Supercomputers to Provide Domestic Hot Water?

Posted on Apr 9, 08 12:44 AM PDT

IBM is working on new ways to cool supercomputers. The idea is simple: get water as close as the chip, or in the chip itself, to extract heat from it. While water-cooling is not new, getting so close to the chip is. The second novelty is that IBM wants to use the hot water for domestic purposes. Examples provided were "to heat your home, the town swimming pool, a hot shower, or to cook a family dinner."

I agree that the hot water could be used locally in the building, but transporting it to “the town swimming pool” seems a little overkill. Also, “hotter” doesn’t seem like what the future of computing should be. Power consumption is already a huge problem today (in computer farms), so brute-force cooling won’t be good enough: we need better performance-per-watt.

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