Supercomputers need standard shot glass to measure out juice The biggest challenge in getting to the next level of supercomputer performance – Exascale – is the massive amounts of electricity these systems will consume. On a smaller scale, energy consumption also inhibits HPC installations. The problem isn’t just getting enough plugs from your walls to the grid; it’s also the cost of …
Option 3. Glass cage, lines of coke(or other stimulant) on the floor, electrodes sprinkled through-out
Caterpilar make a number of large UPSes. We have 1.5MW of their backup units onsite at $orkplace and they get a lot larger than that.
Given the incremental cost over power conditioning the generation plant is trivial cost compared with cost of losing power (even on a 99.999% reliable power supply).
Getting rid of the MW once the computers have finished with it is another (expensive) issue.
Summer? I take you don't know much about Scandinavia. It is now only 10 deg. C in the midle of June here in Norway 40km south of Oslo. And the cooling plant would not be shut down in the winter it would be used to transfer the waste heat to a district heating system via an industrial scale heat pump of the same sort that we use to pump heat out of the river here to warm up pavements to keep them ice free.
The point is to use it to use the heat somewhere where the alternative would have been to use electricity or fuel to produce heat anyway. For example, by preheating water going into a district (or large building) water heating system. If you can use the heat produced by a supercomputer to "offset" the power use by another part of your building, then you are legitimately saving that energy, and can subtract it from the amount of power your data centre eats.
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