IBM has unveiled a new supercomputer called Hydro-Cluster that uses water to cool down the device and reduce energy consumption. IBM claims that data centers using Hydro-Cluster supercomputers can reduce their energy consumption by 40 percent and use 80 percent less cooling. They estimate that water can be up to 4,000-times more effective in cooling computer systems than air.

Computing infrastructures are growing rapidly. Hardware has become less expensive and their form factors smaller and smaller. With the advent of grid technologies, virtualization,and other distributed computing methods we need to find better ways to manage the the sheer number of resources being created.

Grid computing has been around for over 12 years now and its advantages are many. Grid computing can be defined in many ways but for these discussions let's simply call it a way to execute compute jobs (e.g. perl scripts, database queries, etc.) across a distributed set of resources instead of one central resource. In the past most computing was done in silos or large SMP like boxes. Even today you'll still see companies perform calculations on large SMP boxes (e.g. E10K's, HP Superdomes).

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