Anyone who has sat with a laptop on their knees will know that computers generate lots of heat. The aim of CSIRO’s Groundwater Cooling Project is to provide an innovative, sustainable cooling solution for one of the largest computers in the southern hemisphere.
Rather than being cooled using conventional cooling towers, the new $80 million Pawsey Centre supercomputer in Perth is being cooled by using a geothermal solution known as groundwater cooling. The system is expected to save more than 14.5 million litres of water in the first two years of operation, and has the potential to revolutionise the way we cool our buildings.
Water of different temperatures can be extracted from underground layers of rock formations known as aquifers, and used for various thermal purposes. While the harnessing of geothermal energy from deeper high-temperature aquifers is a well-known procedure, cooler underground water found closer to the surface can also provide useful thermal capacity. CSIRO’s groundwater cooling system involves pumping cool water from a shallow aquifer beneath the Australian Resources Research Centre (ARRC) in Kensington, Perth, through an above-ground heat exchanger to cool the supercomputer, before reinjecting the water underground again.
Groundwater cooling is a novel and efficient way of addressing the cooling requirements of buildings and facilities. The absence of conventional cooling towers, which use large amounts of water, means the system is environmentally friendly, and it also performs reliably around the clock regardless of the weather or season. If deployed more widely the groundwater cooling technology has the potential to replace cooling towers in buildings right across Perth, including major facilities such as hospitals and industrial operations. The challenge of cooling the new petascale Pawsey supercomputer - which will provide expertise to support the world’s largest-ever radio telescope (the Square Kilometre Array) and other high-end science- was the driving force behind the Groundwater Cooling Project. The power required to run the groundwater cooling pumps is offset by an array of solar panels on the roof of the Pawsey Centre, making it one of the most sustainable supercomputers on the planet.