IBM: Tapping data center heat for energy

On cold winter weekends when working from home, my wife has been known to use the heat from her PC laptop to keep warm while sitting cross-legged in bed catching up on email. Most of the time, the heat from laptops is too darn warm, but in Wisconsin, there are times when that heat is welcome.

But what if companies or organizations could somehow tap the heat generated by big data center servers to generate electricity or other forms of energy? It turns out that concept already is being pursued by IBM.

In June, IBM announced that it, along with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH), plan to build a water-cooled supercomputer that will directly repurpose excess heat for the university buildings. The system, dubbed Aquasar (see more in IBM video below), is expected to cut the carbon footprint of the system by up to 85 percent compared to a similar system using today’s cooling technologies.

The water-cooled supercomputer will consist of two IBM BladeCenter servers in one rack and will have a peak performance of about 10 Teraflops. The project is part of IBM’s First-Of-A-Kind program (FOAK), which engages IBM’s scientists with clients to explore and pilot emerging technologies that address real world business problems.

According to Chris Sciacca, a communications manager for IBM in Switzerland, a decision concerning commercialization of this technology has not yet been made, but IBM is receiving interest in it from around the world.

I hope this sort of technology finds broader use in more average data centers. For now, it seems like IBM, ETH (and my wife too) are onto something: harnessing what is otherwise wasted heat from computing.