In an effort to achieve energy-aware computing, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH), and IBM last year announced plans to build a first-of-a-kind water-cooled supercomputer that will directly repurpose excess heat for the university buildings. The innovative system, dubbed Aquasar, is expected to decrease the carbon footprint of the system by up to 85% and estimated to save up to 30 tons of CO2 per year, compared to a similar system using today’s cooling technologies. Credit: IBM