"Electronic blood" developed for cooling effect

According to IBM Research scientist Bruno Michel, they "are taking a new approach inspired by the brain." IBM is currently looking into the use of "electronic blood" to help achieve the exascale speeds needed for the real-time analysis of Big Data streaming from the massive networks of the future. The said "electronic blood" will help cool, as well as power future cognitive computers.

"Neurons are both cooled and powered by the blood, and by copying this packaging technique in the brain we hope to achieve a 10,000-times energy efficiency improvement by compacting the volume of our devices by a million times," Michel said.

IBM has announced Monday that it will be joined by the South African government's National Research Foundation and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (NIRA) in the Dome collaborative research project to pioneer the technologies needed to perform real-time analytics on the exascale Big Data streams coming in from a massive array of radio telescope dishes being installed across a 1,824 mile swath of remote Australia desert, also known as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope.

The South African contribution to the project, called Astron, will be to host 64 prototype dishes there as well as to assist IBM and NIRA in creating the computing infrastructure to analyse exabytes of streaming data in real-time. Working at the newly established Astron and IBM Centre for Exascale Technology in Drenthe, the Netherlands, the Dome researchers are aiming for cognitive computing technologies that not only learn and reason like the human brain, but which likewise leverage its energy efficiency.

"If you analyse a typical microchip, only one part per million is used for transistors that perform its functions, while 98 per cent is used for cooling. But in the brain, 40 per cent of its volume is performing functions, 50 per cent is interconnections, and only 10 per cent is used for cooling," said Michel. "We want to produce computers closer to this ratio."

The liquid coolant used will also be the electrolyte of a flow-battery that provides charged ions to the 3D chips. The coolant/electrolyte will flow in channels between each stacked die, whose fins will also serve as the electrodes of the flow battery. After flowing through the 3D chip stack, the fluid will return to a central repository where it is cooled down and recharged before flowing back into chips.

The Dome team will be prototyping microservers using these liquid-cooled and -powered 3D chip stacks in order to process signals from SKA's dishes with the aim of producing images of unparalleled resolution, hopefully enabling scientists to peer back in time to the faint signals still propagating from the Big Bang. And since the amount of data streaming in from SKA will exceed the total traffic on the Internet, the project aims to eventually provide the exascale data processing power for future cognitive computers processing all sorts of business, financial and healthcare data worldwide.

- R. Colin Johnson
??EE Times