IBM smacks rivals with 5.0GHz Power6 beast

Hi Valdis

The use of air for cooling is the admission of lack of technical skills. It is the most power-hungry and inefficient solution around. It is also much more complex than water cooling, and not safe at all (you need to filter and cool humongous volumes, and the fans are very prone to failure).

"I was born in a country and live in a country where free speech is respected." I believe you never ever went to the glorious US of A then.

Benchmarks

Hear hear to the man that praises the SAP benchmark. If you want an application engine to run Java or an HPC environment then by all means look at SpecJBB, SpecFP and all those compute-intensive things, but if you want to see how a database works (and there's few other reasons why you want a big shared-memory multi-processor machine) then there aren't that many good benchmarks around. TPC'C' tends to be more of an exerciser of I/O systems than anthing else (some configurations have over 7,000 disk drives), TPC'H' is OK for data warehouses, but is not readily applicable to transactional systems.

No, if you are stuck wihy a complex ERP package because some architecture team has decided that SAP, Peoplesoft, Siebel, Amdocs CRM or whatever has to be used because it is "off the shelf" and you get faced with some huge, single instance database which doesn't readily lends itself to parallelism, then SAP is about as realistic as it gets. It ain't perfect, but it's the best of a bad job. In a world where benchmarks are marketing tools, where software and hardware vendors contractually prevent the publication of benchmakrs (including those by customers who have paid for the stuff) then there's not much else.

I've no doubt that the new IBM will be the fastest single-instance DB server out there (and we don't use AIX so I'll count myself as unbiased). However, if you do make comparisons then make sure it's the same database, same version (near enough) and don't try and compare UDB/DB2 numbers with different SQL*Server or Oracle.

Oh yes - and back to water cooling. The biggest problem with that for IBM is going to be that very few datacentres are set up for that. Unless IBM have a very slick short cut then that's going to be a problem (unless all they are doing is piping the water to a heat exchanger in the cabinet - which is not the best thing to do, but makes installation vastly easier).

IBM's POWER Platform

IBM has in fact released the POWER platform. It's like the Intel platform only faster and stronger with much more history and reliability.

The Statement: "It will ship this May with AIX and Linux" is mostly true.

The Power platform comes with nothing on it and you as the user can place a mix of AIX, Linux or i (formerly i5/OS or OS/400). The System is and has been for the longest time a virtual haven. Before VMWare was VMWare IBM was doing partitioning .

You can run a mix of OSes on it and before too long you will be able to run Intel based Linux and I would guess Intel based Windows as well.

POWER as a platform is going to change a good many things. I don't think Sun is ready for what IBM has in store.

apple

I want a P-6 Mac!!

Apple may have had a good reason to go with (ugh) Intel, but they should have kept

Power PC available for special order!

Imagine a Mac with a dozen or so of those 5GHz P-6 processors in.....

Evian for the datacenter - not good

I am still open to be convinced that water cooling is better than air. It may be better but not one post has explained the advantages yet.

Why do we make such hot chips. A hot chip implies lots of power/electricity. Then we use electricity to drive a water chiller, then we drive an electric pump. If the chip design was not this hot in the first place then we may not need all this extra cooling. This is the prevention rather than cure argument. Hence my argument why the design is flawed. It was made too hot first of all, then we have to get the plumbers in to cool it down.

In these times of global warming we should be looking for ways to make cooler chips. Can a company use a water cooled Power6 server, install new water cooling, do all the extra work and then say that all these extra resources are good for the planet. Alternatively install a low power, multi-threaded CPU/server, which uses air cooling.

If people think that Power6 is good for heating buildings, then we can use the existing air-cooling systems and the heat they take out of the datacenter to heat the buildings aswell. Just redirect the cooling mechanism.

The new Power6 has a clock rate which is 2x faster than the Power5 (approx), but the Power6 applications may not run 2x faster. The increase in GHz does not match an increase in performance. Thus why do we have such hot high clock rate CPU's. Most of the industry is moving away from high GHz hot CPU's.

The majority of companies Intel, Sun, AMD and IBM Cell make CPU's which do not need water cooling. I am a fan of IBM's cell chip, excellent design. I am not a fan of water cooling. Strangely Sun, Intel, AMD & IBM Cell are moving to more parallel/multi-threaded designs that run cool. What is P6 doing.

IBM for some reason made a variation of the P6 which required water cooling, no answer here.

Because we cool cars with water does that make it good for CPU's. We actually use oil to do the cooling aswell. Next thing which has already been hinted in this discussion is that we will have several liquids in a computer to cool it. More components to me means more complexity. With complexity comes extra costs.

Many comparisons of a new IBM server to old Sun servers, please compare new IBM servers to new Sun servers. My post was about the environment and implications of all the extra resources required to install water cooling in a datacenter. Obviously we need to look at CPU design and the hot chip GHz issues, but mainly my interest was in water cooling issues.

Computer history repeats itself, we may well see more water cooled systems. But I do not think that is a good idea for all the reasons already outlined.

I have been to the US more times than I can remember, half my family are US citizens. I am an alien (see previous comments in The Reg about me) born in a very democratic country, living in another very democratic country where free speech is very much respected. I have seen and worked in 100's of datacenters/rooms. I thought that we saw then end of water cooling, just like ECL, Bipolar Chip design.

A good plumber is hard to find.

My issue about water cooling is with the whole system, the server, the maintenance of the server, redesign of the computer room, the outages required to do all of this etc. From a thermoconductivity perspective water may remove more heat than air. But you need to get the water all the way to the server and plumb it all in. I like plumbing but this is expensive and difficult.

How about not causing the problem in the first place with cooler CPU's.

I think I mentioned and gave examples of liquids that are good for cooling and expensive implementations thereof. e.g. Magnox cooled nuclear reactors. Air is not good to cool nuclear reactors I think that I made that clear.

Cost or ripping up floors and installing pipes is more than not ripping up floors and installing pipes.

If I want to move a air cooled server I unplug the electrics, network, SAN and move it. Then reconnect.

If I want to move a water cooled server call the plumber, book a weekend, possibly shut down the whole datacenter, move the server. Lay new pipes, pressure test new pipes, reconnect electrics. Do I need this complexity extra constraints.

Water is used already in the chillers in the periphery of many computer rooms, you can already use this hot water to heat your office as a green by product. Do we want a water piping grid in addition to all the other infrastructure/cabling in a computer room. Every computer room is different and needs unique/bespoke plumbing to install water cooling to a individual server. For the sake of one hot Power6 server, am I going to re-design the whole datacenter.

If in a couple years time when the whole industry has moved to cooler multi-threaded CPU's/servers, will your investment in water pipes all over the computer room be a good thing. Or will the computer industry employ legions of plumbers to rip out the water pipes that they installed 24 months ago.

I may be totally wrong and water cooling within servers may become more popular and economical, at the moment I find it difficult to believe.

more power Igor

Watercooling for servers is never going to be popular or economical, for all the reasons listed. Water and volts don't mix, even slight accidents are catastrophes. Anything other than HPC and specialist sites will run a mile from the hassle.

IBM don't say how much power these beasts consume and how much heat it puts out. Kilowatts/Hour and BTUs/Hour please (even my electrisave can calculate Kg/Hour of CO2) and then we'll decide if its "green" or not. In the current climate (ouch), these figures are as important as how many tedious SAP users it can support. Power is power and heat is heat, quite how you shift it from the chips to outside the datacenter is moot. Sun get this, I think IBM are too busy outsourcing and consulting to care anymore.

Need to solve both sides of the equation

Valdis is right when he says we have to reduce the power requirements of CPUs, etc., but his dismissal of water cooling is like preventing roads from being built because someone may actually want to drive on them.

Sun tries to solve for both sides of the equation with lower energy servers and cooling technologies. Sun has the CoolThreads CPUS (Niagara & Victoria Falls), but also the Sun Modular Datacenter (widely known as Project Blackbox), which utilizes water cooling and efficient packaging to reduce cooling costs by over 40%. This savings is independent of payload type or vendor. However, if you load the Sun MD with energy efficient systems, like the Niagara servers, the savings are magnified.

hmm nice to see

that this didn't turn into a bun away topic do to my typo.

Yes that's my straight jacket then one that smells like suggar

Will we have an iCooler next ?

The SunMD is a standard design with water cooling built in the factory, every SunMD is the same. No need for any local plumbers to change anything inside when a customer receives it. Just plug it into the power and external cooling pipes. When you buy a Sun Modular Datacenter (aka Blackbox), you do not not have to change anything. Put a water cooled server in a computer room and as explained many times, you need to do lots of extra work and ongoing complexity.

As far as I know all servers in a SunMD are air cooled, no servers are water cooled. But I am sure if someone paid Sun enough money we would be able to connect a water cooled P6 in the SunMD to the pipes. I would advise against this, guess why, it adds complexity.

SunMD is water cooling outside of the computer chassis/enclosure. The Power6 water cooled server is water cooling inside the chassis/enclosure.

My point is about the added complexity, which water causes if you have to put it into an existing datacenter.

Now if people want to make hot chips or more elegant designs then we technologists have a challenge. Produce a coolant that is safer to mix with electrical devices and those nice little towers that we put on CPUs can become a selling point, lets call it the iCooler. I remember that some of the IBM, Hitachi or Amdahl mainframes had those elegant circular tower heatsinks.

Well it was pretty but complex. Now maybe many overclockers like to cool their PC's at home with these type of things. The modders always like new gadgets and to spend time tweaking their systems. Commercial datacenters do not.

NB I built my latest PC with the criteria of least power usage, it is based on a AMD BE-2540 dual core cpu, $ per performance per power usage it was the most efficient. It may not be the fastest, but I was being Mr Sensible. No water anywhere near it.

In commercial datacenters I do not think we can overclock, mod and customize our servers with lights, water coolant towers etc. But maybe the first person to do so could make the datacenter into a work of art and a light show.

Me no iModder.