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Computer engineering: Feeling the heat

Nature volume 492, pages 174–176 (2012)Cite this article

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The more that microcircuits are shrunk, the hotter they get. Engineers are on the hunt for ways to cool off computing.

A laptop computer can double as an effective portable knee-warmer — pleasant in a cold office. But a bigger desktop machine needs a fan. A data centre as large as those used by Google needs a high-volume flow of cooling water. And with cutting-edge supercomputers, the trick is to keep them from melting. A world-class machine at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Munich, for example, operates at 3 petaflops (3 × 1015 operations per second), and the heat it produces warms some of the centre's buildings. Current trends suggest that the next milestone in computing — an exaflop machine performing at 1018 flops — would consume hundreds of megawatts of power (equivalent to the output of a small nuclear plant) and turn virtually all of that energy into heat.

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  1. Philip Ball is a writer based in London.,

    Philip Ball

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IBM Zurich

Bruno Michel

SuperMUC at the Leibniz Rechenzentrum

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Ball, P. Computer engineering: Feeling the heat. Nature 492, 174–176 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/492174a

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