ELECTRONIC BLOOD

 

ELECTRONIC BLOOD

HARISAI MARISA, MIRANJI KATTA

       

 

ABSTRACT

The continuous development in the technology made the search for ways to improve the power handling capability of the transistor as well as IC. The power dissipation usually in the form of heat. It limits the maximum power handling capability of the transistor. It is one of the design metrics in technology evolution. In the view of IC technology heat is seen as one of the major hurdles of producing ever smaller and quicker chips. It is the by-product of the movement of electrons through the tiny wires connecting the millions of components on a modern processor. Conventional cooling techniques such as fans and heat sinks do not work as well with the 3D technology, particularly as heat has to be drawn away from between the individual chips. To solve this problem IBM has unveiled a prototype of a new brain-inspired computer powered by a liquid what it calls "electronic blood".

 

1.       INTRODUCTION

As part of what we can only assume is preparation for some very intense mad scientist Halloween costumes, IBM has announced a prototype computer that is both powered and cooled by an electrolyte liquid. Like everyone, is pretty taken with the capacity and energy efficiency of the human brain and wants to try to replicate it. Of course, the brain is skull-sized and only uses 20 watts of energy per day, so it's a high bar to try to match, but IBM is hoping that its new "redox Flow" system will bring it closer. Two IBM researchers, Patrick Ruch and Bruno Michel demoed the prototype at IBM's Zurich lab.

Generally used cooling techniques such as forced air cooling techniques like fans and heat sinks do not work as well with the 3D technology, to solve this problem IBM has developed a new the brain-inspired computer powered by a liquid what it calls "electronic blood".

 

2.     OPERATION

The "electronic blood" is pumped through the computer and carries power as it pulls heat. The goal is to house a one petaflop computer (currently the size of half a soccer field) in something that will fit on a desk by 2060. A very basic model was demonstrated at the technology giant’s Zurich lab by Dr Patrick Ruch and Dr Bruno Michel. Their vision is that by 2060, a one petaflop computer that would fill half a football field today will fit on your desktop.

 

2.1 Bruno Michel explained:

We want to fit a supercomputer inside a sugar cube. To do that, we need a paradigm shift in electronics — we need to be motivated by our brain. The human brain is 10,000 times more dense and efficient than any computer today. To get a sense of this disparity, the BBC notes that when Watson battled Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, each man used less than 20 watts of energy, while Watson used 85,000 watts. IBM's research is obviously a long way from delivering implementable results for industry or personal computing, but as more and more research is focused on brain-like computing there may be strides toward making computer guts look more like human guts. A network of tiny pipes of water could be used to cool next-generation PC chips, researchers at IBM have said. Scientists at the firm have shown off a prototype device layered with thousands of "hair-width" cooling arteries. They believe it could be a solution to the increasing amount of heat pumped out by chips as they become smaller and more densely packed with components. The technology was demonstrated in IBM's 3D chips, where circuits are stacked one on top of the other. Laying chips vertically, instead of side by side, reduces the distance data has to travel, enhancing performance and saving critical space. “As we package chips on top of each other....we have found that conventional coolers attached to the back of a chip don't scale," explained Thomas Brunsch wiler at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory. "In order to exploit the potential of high-performance 3D chip stacking, we need interlayer cooling." Michel's vision is for a new "bionic" computing architecture, inspired by one of the laws of nature - allometric scaling - where an animal's metabolic power increases with its body size. An elephant, for example, weighs as much as a million mice. But it consumes 30 times less energy, and can perform a task even a million mice cannot accomplish Bruno Michel with a server from Aquasar - a highly efficient liquid-cooled computer the same principle holds true in computing, says Michel, whose bionic vision has three core design features.

 

 The first is 3D architecture, with chips, stacked high, and memory storage units interwoven with processors. "It's the difference between a low-rise the building, where everything is spread out flat, and a high rise building. You shorten the An IBM prototype chip being powered and cooled by charged fluid known informally as "electronic blood."

 

                                                    

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  Fig1.'Electronic blood' could power computers

Engineers at some of the world's biggest tech companies are facing a problem: supercomputers are becoming so powerful that they're in danger of outpacing our ability to power them. IBM unveils computer fed by 'electronic blood’ chips on top of one another locks this heat inside - a major roadblock to 3D computing. IBM's solution is integrated liquid cooling - where chips are interlayered with tiny water pipes. Critical to dissipate the intense heat generated by ever-smaller transistors. Piling the art of liquid cooling has been demonstrated by Aquasar and put to work inside the German supercomputer SuperMUC which - perversely - harnesses warm water to cool its circuits. Connection distances," says Matthias Kaisers werth, director of IBM Zurich. But there is a very good reason today's chips are gridiron pancakes - exposure to the air is Super MUC consumes 40% less electricity as a result.

3.  LIQUID ENGINEERING:

But for IBM to truly match the marvels of the brain, there is a third evolutionary step it must achieve - simultaneous liquid fuelling and cooling. Just as blood gives sugar in one hand and takes heat with another, IBM is looking for a fluid that can multitask. Vanadium is the best performer in their current laboratory test system - a type of redox flow unit - similar to a simple battery.First a liquid - the electrolyte - is charged via electrodes, and then pumped into the computer, where it discharges energy to the chip.

 

                                                     

                                                                                Fig2.Liquid cooling Technique                                                                                                                   

 

SuperMUC uses liquid cooling instead of air - a model for future computer designs Redox flow is far from new technology, and neither is it especially complex. But IBM is the first to stake its chips on this "electronic blood" as the food of future computers - and will attempt to optimise it over the coming decades to achieve Zetta scale computing."To power a Zetta scale computer today would take more electricity than is produced in the entire world," says Michel. He is confident that the design hurdles in his bionic model can be surmounted - not least that a whole additional unit is needed to charge the liquid. And while other labs are betting on spintronics, quantum computing, or photonics to take us beyond silicon, the Zurich team believes the real answer lies right behind our eyes."Just as computers help us understand our brains, if we understand our brains we'll make better computers" says director Matthias Kaiserswerth. He would like to see a future Watson win Jeopardy on a level playing field.

A redox flow test system - the different coloured liquids have different oxidation states. Other experts in computing agree that IBM's 3D principles are sound. But as to whether bionic computing will be the breakthrough technology, the jury is out." The idea of using a fluid to both power and cool strikes me as very novel engineering - killing two birds with one stone," says Prof Alan Woodward, of the University of Surrey's computing department.   

Fig3. A prototype of liquid cooling

"But every form of future computing has its champions - whether it be quantum computing, DNA computing or neuromorphic computing.”There is a long way to go from the lab to having one of these sitting under your desk." Prof Steve Furber, leader of the Spinnaker project agrees that "going into the third dimension" has more to offer than continually shrinking transistors."The big issue with 3D computing is getting the heat out - and liquid cooling could be very effective if integrated into 3D systems as proposed here," he told the BBC."But all of the above will not get electronics down to the energy-efficiency of the brain.

"That will require many more changes, including a move to analogue computation instead of digital. "It will also involve breakthroughs in new non-Turing models of computation, for example, based on an understanding of how the brain processes information."

 

3.1  Cool running:

As more and more components are packed on to chips - Intel recently launched a processor with two billion transistors, for example - the problems become worse. As a result, researchers around the world are engaged in a search for the most efficient way to take the heat off the chip industry. For example, in 2007, US researchers built tiny wind engines that created a "breeze" made up of charged particles, or ions, to cool computer chips. But the problems are exacerbated in the multi-storey chips which IBM, as well as others, believes offer "one of the most promising approaches" for building future processors. Each 4 sq cm sandwich is just 1mm thick but pumps out close to 1kilowatt - equivalent to that generated by a hotplate.

Conventional cooling techniques such as fans and heat sinks do not work as well with the 3D technology, particularly as heat has to be drawn away from between the individual chips. To get around this, researchers piped water through sealed tubes just 50 microns (millionths of a metre) in diameter, between individual layers. Water is much more efficient than air at absorbing heat and so even with tiny amounts of liquid flowing through the system, the researchers saw a significant effect.  The idea of pumping liquids around computers is not entirely new. Early mainframe computers had water pumped around them.

High end computers have been "modded" for a number of years with water coolers and various researchers and companies have put forward proposals for directly cooling chips with fluids. In 2003, Stanford University spin-out company Coligny showed off its Active Micro-Channel Cooling (AMC) technology which allowed fluids to circulate through hundreds of tiny channels on the upper surface of a chip. The technology was used in some versions of Apple's Power Mac G5 desktop computer, released in 2004.

IBM has said its water-cooling technology could be in products within five years.

 

                                               

                                                Fig4. Liquid controlling by using 3D stacked architecture

 

Liquid cooling has emerged as a promising solution for addressing the elevated temperatures in 3D stacked architectures. In this work, we first propose a framework for detailed thermal modelling of the embedded between the tiers of the 3D system. In multicore systems, workload varies at runtime, and the system is generally not fully utilized. Thus, it is not energy-efficient to adjust the coolant flow rate based on the worst-case conditions, as this would cause an excess in pump power. For energy-efficient cooling, we propose a novel controller to adjust the liquid flow rate to meet the desired temperature and to minimize pump energy consumption. Our Technique also includes a job scheduler, which balances the temperature across the system to maximize cooling efficiency and to improve reliability. Our method guarantees operating below the target temperature while reducing the cooling energy by up to 30%, and the overall energy by up to 12% in comparison to using the highest coolant flow rate.

 

4.  INSPIRATION

Engineers at some of the world's biggest tech companies are facing a problem: supercomputers are becoming so powerful that they're in danger of outpacing our ability to power them. IBM unveils computer fed by 'electronic blood’ chips on top of one another locks this heat inside - a major roadblock to 3D computing. IBM has developed a new brain-inspired computer powered by what it calls "electronic blood".

 

4.1 Blood flow in the human brain

We want to fit a supercomputer inside a sugar cube. To do that, we need a paradigm shift in electronics — we need to be motivated by our brain. The human brain is 10,000 times more dense and efficient than any computer today. Because it uses the same network of blood vessels to transport heat and energy simultaneously, To get a sense of this disparity, the BBC notes that when Watson battled Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, each man used less than 20 watts of energy, while Watson used 85,000 watts. IBM's research is obviously a long way from delivering implementable results for industry or personal computing, but as more and more research is focused on brain-like computing there may be strides toward making computer guts look more like human guts.

                                    

Fig5. Human brain

The human brain carries sugar nothing but glucose in one hand to the brain  and in another hand, it dissipates heat generated in the brain like this electronic blood carries energy nothing but power in one hand to the processors  and in another hand, it dissipates heat generated in the processors.

 

4.2 Redox flow battery

To tell this idea to become successful here we show an existing example that is a redox flow battery. A flow battery, or redox flow battery (after reduction–oxidation), is a type of rechargeable battery where rechargeability is provided by two chemical components dissolved in liquids contained within the system and separated by a membrane.^[1] Ion exchange (providing a flow of electrical current) occurs through the membrane while both liquids circulate in their own respective space. Cell voltage is chemically determined by the Nernst equation and ranges, in practical applications, from 1.0 to 2.2 Volts.

 

A flow battery is technically akin both to a fuel cell and an electrochemical accumulator cell (electrochemical reversibility). While it has technical advantages such as potentially separable liquid tanks and near unlimited longevity over most conventional rechargeable, current implementations are comparatively less powerful and require more sophisticated electronics.

The vanadium redox (and redox flow) battery is a type of rechargeable flow battery that employs vanadium ions in different oxidation states to store chemical potential energy. The present form (with sulfuric acid electrolytes) was patented by the University of New South Wales in Australia in 1986.

Fig6. Redox flow battery

An earlier German Patent on a titanium chloride flow battery was registered and granted in July 1954 to Dr. Walter Kangro, but most of the development of flow batteries was carried out by NASA researchers in the 1970s. However, Pissoort, Pellegri and Spaziante commenced the first known successful demonstration and commercial development of the all-vanadium redox flow battery employing vanadium in a solution of sulfuric acid in each half was by Maria Skyllas-Kazacos and co-workers at the University of New South Wales in the 1980s.

There are numerous sources that have been funding and developing the technology including UniEnergy Technologies and Ashlawn Energy in the United States, Renewable Energy Dynamics Technology (RED-T) in Ireland, Gildemeister AG (formerly Cellstrom GmbH in Austria) in Germany, Cellennium in Thailand, Rongke Power and Prudent Energy in China, Sumitomo in Japan and H2, Inc. in South Korea.^[8] The vanadium redox battery (VRB) is the product of over 25 years of research, development, testing and evaluation in Australia, Europe, North America and elsewhere.

The vanadium redox battery exploits the ability of vanadium to exist in solution in four different oxidation states, and uses this property to make a battery that has just one electroactive element instead of two.

The main advantages of the vanadium redox battery are that it can offer almost unlimited capacity simply by using larger and larger storage tanks, it can be left completely discharged for long periods with no ill effects, it can be recharged simply by replacing the electrolyte if no power source is available to charge it, and if the electrolytes are accidentally mixed the battery suffers no permanent damage.

The main disadvantages with vanadium redox technology are a relatively poor energy-to-volume ratio, although recent research at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has doubled energy density, and the system complexity in comparison with standard storage batteries.

 

             Fig7. IBM redox flow battery                                     Fig8. Bruno Michel shows redox flow battery              

 

5.             CONCLUSIONS

 

•       Minimize the size of super computer.

•       Could power computers.

•       Reduces the heat generated in the processor.

 

  

 

REFERENCES

[1]    IBM aims at cool chips with water. June 2008

[2]    http://news.bbc.co.uk/technology -11734909 ‘Super computer will fit in a sugar cube’ IBM says By Jason palmer. Science & technology reports BBC news, Zurich. 12 November 2010

[3]    http://neatorama.com/2013/10/18/IBMs-new-computer-is-powred-by-electronic-blood/ IBM’s new computer is powered by “Electronic blood” Alex.santoso.Friday, october 18,2013

[4]    IBM unveils computer fed by electronic blood   By James Morgan Science reporter, BBC news, Zurich. 18 October 2013

[5]                 “Electronic blood” could power next-gen computers Oct 23, 2013 12:32 p ET// By jesse empak.

[6]      Electronic blood could power computers By james o’Toole@jtotooole May 6,2014:12:43 pm

[7]                  www.redoxflowsystem/vanadium/wiki.orgen.wikipedia.prg/wiki/vanadium-redo