The Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ), in collaboration with IBM, today announced the world's first commercially available hot-water cooled supercomputer, a powerful, high-performance system designed to help researchers and industrial institutions across Europe investigate and solve some of the world's most daunting scientific challenges.

The new LRZ "SuperMUC" system was built with IBM System x iDataPlex Direct Water Cooled dx360 M4 servers with more than 150,000 cores to provide a peak performance of up to three petaflops, which is equivalent to the work of more than 110,000 personal computers.  Put another way, three billion people using a pocket calculator would have to perform one million operations per second each to reach equivalent SuperMUC performance. Also, a revolutionary new form of hot-water cooling technology invented by IBM allows the system to be built 10 times more compact and substantially improve its peak performance while consuming 40 percent less energy than a comparable air-cooled machine.

A first animation of the new 3 PFLOPS/s system "SuperMUC". The system was designed by IBM for the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) and consists of more than 150,000 Intel processor cores with Sandy Bridge technology (Xeon E5, Sandy Bridge EP). The system has innovative warm water cooling, using 30DegC warm water to cool the CPUs, memory modules and peripheral modules. The system is ranked no. 4 in the Top500 list released at the International Supercomputing Conference ISC12 in Hamburg, June 18, 2012. The orange cables are the Infiniband interconnect.