Inside one of the world’s fastest supercomputers

0:00Stunning Lakeside views and postcard perfect scenery.

0:08Lugano is tucked into Switzerland's southernmost canton.

0:14But aside from its beautiful landscape,

0:17there's one other jewel in the crown of this Swiss

0:20Mediterranean city.

0:23Computation of power.

0:27This is the home of Alps, not the mountains, but a different kind of giant.

0:33One of the world's most advanced supercomputers.

0:36It's the latest generation of high performance computing.

0:40Imagine you have your laptop.

0:42But now imagine that you have 10,000 or 20,000 of those laptops.

0:48So here we look at extremely capable processors

0:51that are more capable than your laptop processor

0:53and we're looking at nearly 11,000 of those.

0:56That's a supercomputing center. Wow.

0:58But such power comes at a cost, hate and a lot of it.

1:04This isn't your average data center full of noisy fans and air conditioned chillers.

1:10Instead, what's impressive about this

1:12place isn't just its brain power,

1:15it's how it's

1:16rum, built not only for speed but also sustainability.

1:21Alps draws from the same source that has

1:23sustained Switzerland for millennia, glacial

1:26water.

1:27"When you think of supercomputers, you don't necessarily think of pipes and pumps."

1:31What is happening in here?

1:33So supercomputers burn tens of megawatts.

1:38And so that turns into heat that you have to somehow remove.

1:43And so the setup we have here is we take water from the lake.

1:47And this is the big pipe coming in.

1:50And then this water goes into a heat exchanger

1:55where the water stays in the center.

1:59The centre typically cools around 10 to 15

2:02megawatts, but has the capacity to go up to 25.

2:07Water from Lake Logano is drawn in, where it's typically 7 degrees Celsius.

2:13Once used to cool the vast array of technical infrastructure,

2:16it goes back to the lake around 15 to 20 degrees Celsius.

2:20The inherent problems that we have is we need water for cooling.

2:25and we need electricity to power the machines.

2:28The two don't go well if something happens.

2:31And this is why we are on the raised floor

2:34and so should something happen,

2:37you know, some pipe breaks or so and water comes out,

2:41it will be collected here

2:43and then this is really separated into different sectors

2:48so that the water damage over here doesn't move.

2:51on the other side.

2:53One level above, the pipes may be smaller,

2:56but water is still very much at the heart of the supercomputer centre.

3:00Each of the 2,688 blades has a blue and red pipe,

3:06colour-coded to avoid confusion during planned maintenance.

3:11So this is the inside of one of these blades,

3:14one of these many blades in this system.

3:16What are we looking at here? OK.

3:19Here you have a grays and a hopper

3:23processor, so a multicore CPU and a GPU,

3:27H100 GPU.

3:28And they are of course consuming a lot of power,

3:31so that's why the liquid cooling goes directly on the processor.

3:35So that's what these copper pipes here are.

3:40Where the cold water comes in here, is distributed, and then comes in...

3:46the warm water goes out back into the data center.

3:53By crunching vast amounts of environmental data,

3:56Alps helps forecast sea level rise, glacial retreat

4:00and extreme weather events on a global scale.

4:04AI is basically you're building a predictive model based on data.

4:10So you could, for example, increase computationally

4:14the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.

4:16What happens then?

4:17What you can now do with those simulations

4:19is you can take your little understanding

4:21of reflective properties,

4:22but you can now scale it up to the whole planet.

4:25So these are all things that are not easy to understand,

4:28but you can run it in massive simulations,

4:30like on this machine.

4:31Not far from Alps is the Condra Dam.

4:34It's the fourth tallest dam in Switzerland, standing at 220 metres high.

4:40It's source, the Verzasca River,

4:43which is heavily influenced by rain and snowfall in the

4:46surrounding mountainous region.

4:49This valley is famous for its extreme precipitation

4:54events, so it holds some of the world records of

4:57precipitation.

4:59What we are doing, we are using the supercomputer

5:03ops in Switzerland and on global climate

5:06simulations.

5:07One of the models aims to predict the impacts of rising CO2 levels on the planet.

5:13They do this by performing a series of tests

5:16replicated on a worldwide scale to see how the

5:19atmosphere reacts.

5:21If you sort of think of the Earth, we have millions of...

5:25We have grid points or locations where we

5:28actually sample the environmental conditions

5:30like temperature, wind and so on.

5:32And then we have to go up in altitude, 150 levels.

5:36And then we have millions, millions of computations.

5:40It's basically impossible to run on a normal computer.

5:46In a world facing both data overload and environmental crisis, Alps

5:52is a chance for technology and nature to work together,

5:56setting a standard for how supercomputers stay cool

5:59without heating the planet.