Europe’s most power supercomputer – the SuperMUC which ranks fourth in the June 2012 TOP500 list of fastest supercomputers – has been officially inaugurated at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Garching, Germany.

The computer uses an innovative warm-water cooling technology to keep the 155,000 core System X iDataPlex facility running.

IBM said it was inspired by human blood circulation when designing the cooling system, which brings about energy savings of 40% when compared to machines using traditional cooling methods.

Excess heat is then used to heat the campus, near Munich which can see temperatures fall to less than -2.2 degrees Celsius during the winter.

SuperMUC is powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise Servers, where it makes sense, uses frequency scaling – a Linux kernel function delivered using SUSE Linux Enterprise which allows the Liebniz-Rechenzentrum (LRZ) department to run applications at optimal running point, according to LRZ head of high-performance systems Dr Herbert Huber.

“This means we use, wherever possible, newly developed energy efficiency mechanisms in Linux,” Huber said.

The supercomputing center in Germany provides resources for the Munich Scientific Network which not only connects universities in Munich but the universities to other scientific facilities with 10Gbit/s connections.

SuperMUC was built to be the successor of the Hochstleistungsrechner Bayern II supercomputer and operates alongside it as part of a high performance power pyramid, which connects it to two other supercomputers at the center.