QPACE, World’s Most Energy Efficient Supercomputer Related to PS3

The QPACE supercomputer at the Research Center Jülich and the University of Wuppertal tops the latest version of the Green500 list, which ranks the energy efficiency of supercomputers around the world. The QPACEs Intel PowerXCell processors are an enhancement of the Cell/B.E. processor, originally developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM for the Sony PlayStation 3.

QPACE (Quantum chromodynamics Parallel Computing on the Cell) is being used to simulate forces in elementary particle physics, especially in the research area of quantum chromodynamics, which describes such things as how a proton is made up out of quarks and gluons. It consists of four racks at Research Center Jülich and four at the University of Wuppertal. Each of the QPACE installations has a top performance of 100 TeraFlops, equal to 100 trillion floating point operations per second. The supercomputer runs a standard Fedora Linux distro OS.

Each rack in QPACE contains 256 IBM PowerXCell 8i nine-core processors and 1 Terabyte storage, and uses 30 kilowatts of power. One green aspect of QPACE is it’s overall architecture, in which off-the-shelf (rather than custom designed) processors are connected by a network of Xilinx Virtex-5 LX110T Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), to an efficient scalable computer. Also contributing to the overall energy efficiency is a new water cooling concept developed in the IBM research and development center in Böblingen.

An excerpt from a research paper on the QPACE details the cooling system: “The node cards are packed into thermal boxes made of aluminium. These boxes act as a single big heat sink conducting the heat from the internal components to the surface. The thermal box is then connected to a cold plate. Water is pumped through channels inside the cold plate which moves the heat out of the system.”