Supercomputers are about the size of a sugar cube

Scientists from IBM are committed to rapidly reducing the size of the world's most powerful supercomputers to the size of a sugar cube, which is equivalent to 1cm.

They said their breakthrough purpose was only to reduce energy consumption, not to reduce the size of future supercomputers.

The supercomputer processor is only about the size of a sugar. (Photo: Kp.ru).

According to the project leader, Dr. Bruno Michel , IBM's Laboratory in Zurich, the price of a computer will depend on how much more energy is saved on its computing speed. The cost to maintain the operation of the data processing unit in the device will be higher than the price of the device itself.

The team created a prototype device to illustrate the principle of a water-cooled device, called the Aquasar , just as big as a normal refrigerator. According to calculations, Aquasar consumes only half the energy of supercomputers in the world today.

In the past, people listed the fastest computers of TOP-500 and classified them according to their capacity. From now on they will be listed as ' Green 500 ' and classify them according to their energy savings. Not long ago the supercomputers on this list were able to perform 770 million calculations in a second and consume 1 watt of energy.

Aquasar has 1.5 times higher speed, performing 1.1 billion calculations in 1 second. The task of reducing the size is set. Scientists have set a target for another 10-15 years, they will reduce the whole system to the size of a sugar cube.

At the press conference, Dr. Michel proudly declares: ' We will create small supercomputers with a sugar cube, placing microprocessors stacked on top of each other, but separated by water cooling channels, no thicker than a hair. If the distance between the large processors will adversely affect the working speed of the machine and radiate a lot of heat, the arrangement of nearby chips will simultaneously solve all 3 problems: speed, size and energy consumption ".

One of the technical requirements for engineers is to ensure the connection between chips, working as a conductor and waterproof. But experts believe it is not too difficult to overcome this.