Supercomputers 'will fit in a sugar cube', IBM says

Jason Palmer - A pioneering research effort could shrink the world's most powerful supercomputer processors to the size of a sugar cube, IBM scientists say.

The approach will see many computer processors stacked on top of one another, cooling them with water flowing between each one.

The aim is to reduce computers' energy use, rather than just to shrink them.

Some 2% of the world's total energy is consumed by building and running computer equipment.

Speaking at IBM's Zurich labs, Dr Bruno Michel said future computer costs would hinge on green credentials rather than speed.

Dr Michel and his team have already built a prototype to demonstrate the water-cooling principle. Called Aquasar, it occupies a rack larger than a refrigerator.

IBM estimates that Aquasar is almost 50% more energy-efficient than the world's leading supercomputers. ...

Until recently, the supercomputer at the top of that list could do about 770 million computational operations at a cost of one watt of power.

The Aquasar prototype clocked up nearly half again as much, at 1.1 billion operations ...

via BBC News - Supercomputers 'will fit in a sugar cube', IBM says.