In an Australian first, the CSIRO will replace cooling towers with an innovative groundwater cooling solution to cool the country's largest supercomputer.
The CSIRO Geothermal Project will deliver a novel solution for cooling the Pawsey Centre supercomputer, which includes the creation of an $80 million facility currently under construction in Kensington, south Perth.
CSIRO project director, Steve Harvey, says the groundwater cooling system works by pumping cool water from a depth of around 100 metres through an above-ground heat exchanger to cool the supercomputer, then re-injecting the water underground.
"Although the water returned to the aquifer is a few degrees warmer than the surrounds, the groundwater cooling system is engineered to prevent negative impacts to the surrounding environment," he says.
With zero net use of groundwater, the system is also environmentally friendly.
The CSIRO estimates that using groundwater cooling to cool the Pawsey Centre supercomputer will save about 38.5 million litres of water every year, in comparison to using conventional cooling towers.
That's enough to fill more than 150 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
If deployed more widely, the technology has the potential to replace cooling towers in buildings all over Perth, CSIRO says.
Drilling work to implement the groundwater cooling system has begun at the Australian Resources Research Centre (ARRC) in Kensington's Technology Park – the same site that houses Australia's largest supercomputer.
The challenge of cooling the new petascale computing system, which will provide expertise to support the world's largest ever radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array, was one of the driving forces behind the geothermal project.
"Supercomputers use large amounts of electrical power, almost all of which is turned into heat and requires cooling,”Harvey says.
"Recent global changes in the cooling requirements for supercomputers, however, mean that we can now use water of an ambient temperature, as opposed to chilled water. That's where groundwater cooling comes in.”
In addition to cooling the supercomputer, the Geothermal Project will investigate a potentially deeper energy resource located beneath the ARRC site by constructing a 3km deep exploration well later this year.
