A supercomputing center in Europe has deployed the world’s first supercomputer cooled by hot water, IBM, who built the machine, announced Monday.

Called SuperMUC, the system was built with IBM System x iDataPlex Direct Water Cooled dx360 M4 servers. More than 150,000 cores provide up to three petaflops of processing power to the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ) in Garching, Germany, serving Munich universities and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Arndt Bode, chairman of the board at LRZ, said state-funded institutions in Germany were required to purchase 100% of the energy they consume in 2012 from sustainable sources. The new system will make it easier for the center to comply.

“SuperMUC will help us keep our commitment, while giving the scientific community a best-in-class system to test theories, design experiments and predict outcomes as never before,” Bode said.

The cooling system uses water as warm as 113F to cool active components in the system directly. Since water is 4,000 times more efficient at heat removal than air, according to IBM, it does not need to be cooled down as much to do the job.

SuperMUC, running on 18,000 Intel Xeon processors, is the fastest computer in Europe, according to the latest Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers released Monday in conjunction with the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg.

Hot water is a rarely-used form of cooling, considered energy efficient but esoteric. An example of another publicly announced deployment of this cooling technology is at eBay’s data center in Phoenix, Arizona, codenamed “Project Mercury”.