The Big Blue unveiled today its new Power 575, a supercomputer which uses water-chilled copper plates located above each microprocessor to remove heat from the electronics.

The supercomputer is based on the latest POWER6 microprocessor and IBM explained that by requiring 80 percent fewer air conditioning units, the water-cooled Power 575 can reduce typical energy consumption used to cool the data center by 40 percent.

The system, which due to the cooling solution,  is also called “Hydro-Cluster”, includes

448 processor cores per rack and it offers more than five times the performance of its predecessor.

A single rack features 14 2U nodes, each with 32, 4.7-Ghz cores of POWER6, a 3.5 TB of memory, and yet is more energy efficient than traditional air-cooled designs. At 600 GFlops per node, the Power 575 is three times more energy-efficient in GFlops per kilowatt than the POWER generation of air-cooled processors.

"The Power 575, like all POWER-based supercomputers, is designed for the most computationally intensive problems in energy, engineering, aerospace, and weather modeling,” said Dave Jursik, VP of supercomputing sales for IBM. “IBM continually stretches the boundaries of high-end supercomputing and energy efficiency to meet the expanding requirements of science and technological progress.”

The Power 575 supports both AIX - the IBM UNIX operating system - and Linux, and will be generally available in May.

Besides Power 575, IBM unveiled a new Unix enterprise server, the Power 595, designed to extend IBM's leadership in the UNIX market, will be attractive to existing IBM clients as well as Sun Solaris and HP UNIX users.

Using the latest 5.0 GHz POWER6 processor chips with dual memory controllers, and leveraging a new, sophisticated symmetric multi-processor (SMP) point-to-point interconnect to communicate between its cores, the Power 595 bested the results of all competitors for running large two-tier environments running the SAP ERP application.

In fact, two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark results showed a 32 processor/64-core/128 thread Power 595 can handle more than twice the number of users per core of a 64 processor/128-core/256 thread Itanium-based HP Superdome system. The Power 595 will be generally available on May 6.