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back to article Swiss boffins jump in Lake Lugano for Cray super

The boffins at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) are opened up a new supercomputing center in Lugano this year, and now they are getting a shiny new "Cascade" parallel supercomputer from Cray to hum away inside of it. The Cascade machine at CSCS is not just interesting because of the "Aries" interconnect that …

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  1. E 2

    Toronto city is investigating pumping cold water from the bottom of Lake Ontario to use in cooling office towers. Problem with that and this scheme is the turnover in deep lakes is not very fast. It is quite possible that in 20 years all T.O or the Swiss will have is warm lakes.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Happy

      Lugano should last ok

      Wikipedia puts the annual inflow at 0.79km^3 with the major water sources originating at over 2000m altitude, ie lots of meltwater. The cooling system described is for a maximum of 21MW: even if all of that energy re-enters the lake (and the described cooling ponds ensure it won't) then in a year that's 662TJ of energy deposited and 790Tg of virgin water awaiting it: 0.84J/g means a temperature increase of 0.2K for the outflow.

      Of course that's absurdly glib and in practice the limited mixing would mean a much larger temperature increase where the cooling water is released, but providing that's well separated from the intake then the sustainability of the cooling looks ok.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Warm lakes are OK

      Think of what this could do for the holiday industry!

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    3. mhenriday
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      Boffin

      We've been doing this for some time in Stockholm

      (http://www.termoekonomi.se/Hornsberg-cold-water-storage.htm) - although I must admit that the water being pumped to cool offices in summer here is not taken directly from Lake Ontario....

      Henri

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  2. Peter Ford

    Never mind the birds

    the algae will love it...

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  3. The answer is 42

    :Never mind the birds

    Fish like it warm as well; I seem to remember as a child, fish caught in the rivers near power station cooling tower outlets were bigger as well.

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    1. hammarbtyp
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      Mushroom

      Re: :Never mind the birds

      and had 3 eyes

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    2. JLH
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      Re: :Never mind the birds

      As a child I lived in the town in Scotland where the huge Singer factory had its own power station.

      The station discharged warm water into the canal, which had monster goldfish as a result.

      I now work in a building which has a massive lake used as a cooling pond - and yes we do keep fish in it!

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  4. Jacqui

    grow algae intentionally

    and use this to make biofuel!

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Presumably, this is one of their lakes that "doesn't" have vast amounts of WWII ammo dumped in it and corroding? Still, I can see why it was preferable to the various warehouse explosion fatalities that occurred earlier ...

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