Alternative method to cool Supercomputers

Context: A team of researchers from IIT Bombay and the Centre for Materials for Electronics Technology (C-MET), Pune, has proposed using Low-Temperature Co-fired Ceramic (LTCC) as an efficient alternative to the conventionally used copper for making cold-plates. 

Current method of cooling of Supercomputers

1. High-Performance Computing systems (HPCs) or supercomputers resort to cooling using liquid coolants and cold plates that dissipate heat.
2. In liquid cooled devices, liquid coolants like deionised water that is without any electrical charge, are circulated through the system to remove the excess heat.
3. Cold plates are used like heat sinks, transferring heat from the circuit components into the coolant liquid. Copper is the preferred material for manufacturing cold plates due to its low cost and high thermal conductivity.

Use of LTCC technology for cold plates

1. Low-Temperature Co-fired Ceramic (LTCC) technology is used to manufacture ceramic substrates for circuits.
2. Substrates are materials on which electrical interconnections are printed and other components like resistors, inductors and capacitors are mounted.
3. PCB (Printed circuit boards) is the most commonly used substrate in electronic devices.
4. LTCC Technology allows compact three-dimensional packing of the circuit, making it smaller and more efficient than conventional PCBs.
5. Microfluidic channels (micrometre sized tiny channels that allow flow of a liquid through it) can be created in an LTCC package to form a cold plate.
6. The cold plates can effectively cool microprocessor chips in supercomputers, successfully restricting temperatures below the safety limits, just as copper cold plates do.
7. It paves the way for integrating cooling solutions directly into the chip package.

Supercomputers

1. A supercomputer is an extremely robust computing device that processes data at speeds measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). A supercomputer could perform computations at 100 PFLOPS (Peta FLPOPS).
2. It is used to perform complex calculations and simulations, usually in the field of research, artificial intelligence, and big data computing.
3. Uses of supercomputers: Weather forecasting, oil and gas exploration, medical research, nuclear fusion research, etc.
4. India’s supercomputers: PARAM Shivay (first supercomputer of India), PARAM Pravega (IISc, Bangalore), PARAM Utkarsh (C-DAC, Bangalore), PARAM Ananta (IIT, Gandhinagar), PARAM Himalaya (IIT, Mandi), PARAM Siddhi-AI (C-DAC, Pune), and PARAM Vidya series.