Today, Supermuck, an IBM hot water-cooled supercomputer built for the Libre-P-Supercomputing Centre in Germany, has been named one of the most powerful in the world. The official results were reported yesterday during the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg. The massive IBM iDataplex supercomputer is three petaflops with more than 18,000 processors, yet it consumes 40% less energy than a comparable air-cooled machine. Supermuck achieves these remarkable energy savings by employing an innovative cooling technology, which is inspired by the human circulatory system. Similar to how blood and oxygen are delivered throughout the body, microchannel liquid coolers transport water directly to the processors and then carry away the heat. The heat is then transported to a heat exchanger where it can then be used to provide heat for the buildings. Herbert Huber from the Libenit Supercomputing Centre explains why the supercomputer is so important. Germany is very greenish, so to say. So, energy and power awareness is a crucial aspect in Germany. IBM came up with a direct liquid cool system, so it had a completely different cooling technology, which allows us to operate our supercomputer, hold it the whole year without any chillers, without any compressor. So we can save up to 1 million euro per year, only because of this new cooling and system packaging technology. Supermuck is based on the IBM Aquasar supercomputer that was built for ETH Zurich in 2010. Both computers are significant milestones in a water-cooled computing roadmap for IBM that can be traced back to the 1960s. IBM scientist Bruno Michel explains, in the future we will reduce the size of the system by another factor of 10 for the next 5 years. And as time goes by for each 5 years we need to reduce it another factor of 10, which means then eventually a million fold reduction of Supermuck, so that it fits into one box, like one PC box. The entire system lets current the many thousand cubic meters into an entire PC box. And that will increase the efficiency of the system by a large factor. Now that Supermuck is operational, it will be available for scientists across Europe to explore a wide spectrum of research. Hans Peter Bungaib from the University of Munich comments, We want to use the Supermuck to figure out what causes earthquakes. What Supermuck will allow us is probably an order of magnitude better understanding at a level that had not been run before 20 years ago. When I heard about the size of the machine, I realised that the length scale and time scale problems would for the first time be really addressable with that machine. Supermuck will be officially inaugurated in July at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in front of hundreds of guests. This is Amary Kromack reporting.