Sugar Cube could be the size of Supercomputers

The worlds most powerful computers could be shrunk to the size of a sugar cube, IBM scientists said it could be possible with their pioneering research efforts. Many computer processors would be stacked on top of one another with water cooling them as it flowed between each one. A prototype has already been built by Dr Michel and his team to demonstrate the water cooling principle. It occupies a rack larger than a refrigerator and is called Aquasar. Aquasar is almost 50% more energy efficient than the worlds supercomputers. IBM has estimated. Rather than just shrink the size, the aim is to reduce the energy the computers uses. To run a data center will cost more than to build it, said Dr Michel, “in the future computers will be dominated by energy costs. Because computing power generates heat as a side product, the overwhelming cause of those energy costs is in the cooling. The Aquasar system thay have currently built is a rack full of processors. The plan is to collapse such a system in to one sugar cube in about 10 to 15 years from now and we will have a supercomputer in a sugar cube .The supercomputer at the top of the list could do about 770 million computational operations at a cost of one watt of power, Dr Bruno said, when he spoke at IBMs Zurich labs, the future computer costs would hinge on green credentials rather than speed