Water cooling beats air-cooled systems, according to scientists at Armonk, N.Y.-based International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM), and they've incorporated a new water-cooled system into the company's latest supercomputer, dubbed the Hydro-Cluster.

Unlike current water-cooling, this new system brings the water up close and personal with the processor.

Introduced by the computer maker today and available to the market in May, IBM said the Hydro-Cluster, officially known as the Power 575, could reduce typical energy consumption used to cool a data center by 40 percent.

Previous water-cooled systems have come from companies like Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Silicon Graphics (Nasdaq: SGIC) and Seattle, Wash.'s Cray (Nasdaq: CRAY), as well as IBM, which sells the Cool Blue Rear Door Heat eXchanger.

The Cool Blue takes the heat out of the air in the computer rack, instead of letting it get to the room's air conditioning system, but the Hydro-Cluster takes the technology a step beyond.

"We have that heat exchanger on the back of our frame, but we also send water right to heat sinks that are mounted to our processors," Michael Ellsworth, an IBM engineer who worked on the Hydro-Cluster, told Cleantech.com.

"And we take the heat away from the processors — right away — before it can even get into the air."

The system uses water-chilled copper plates above each microprocessor to remove the heat from the electronics.

Take a look at a rendering of the system here >>

The water is then re-chilled and re-used using two modular water cooling units at the bottom of the Hydro-Cluster's frame.

"The basic components of these units are a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger, separating what we call our 'system water,' which we circulate through our electronic system to cool the processors and to go through the rear door, that water is kept separate from building chilled water that we tap into," said Ellsworth.

IBM said it was able to run a 12-rack, water-cooled system with 83 percent fewer air conditioning units than would be needed for a similar cluster of air-cooled systems – running two versus the 18 it said would normally be required.

Check out an installation of the Hydro-Cluster here >>

The company said that water could be up to 4,000 times more effective in cooling computer systems than air.

The Hydro-Cluster also packs more of a processing punch than its predecessor. IBM said there are 448 processor cores per rack, offering a boost of more than five times in performance, and three times more energy efficiency per rack.

Other computer makers, as well as computer hungry companies like Mountain View, Calif.-based Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), have also been working on ways to boost the efficiency of data centers.

Last year, Google teamed up with Santa Clara, Calif.'s Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) and other companies to form the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which advocates the design and adoption of less wasteful computing infrastructure (see Green Grid joined by Climate Savers initiative from Google & Intel).

The group aims to achieve a 50 percent reduction in power consumption by computers by 2010.

IBM formed its own environmental initiative last year, setting up Project Big Green, a $1 billion investment to increase the efficiency of its products.

The company has also created system to cut down on waste in the production of semiconductors. IBM's pattern removal process can recycle scrap silicon wafers for use in solar panels (see IBM cleans up silicon wafers).

IBM's latest Hydro-Cluster product offers a significant gain in energy efficiency, but the technology isn't really all that new for Big Blue.

Ellsworth said the company did this type of water cooling back in the 1980s and 1990s on its high-end mainframes.

"We've taken a lot of that and what we learned from there, and re-did it for the form factor that we're doing now, but the technology is very similar to what was done back in that timeframe."

IBM is already planning the next step in energy efficient supercomputing, which involves getting the water even closer to the chip.

Scientists at the company's Zurich research laboratory are working on a Zero-Emission Data Center which would eliminate the use of the copper plate, putting the water right inside the processor.