Cooling the world’s largest supercomputers

Supercomputers, capable of processing more than 1015 (1 million billion) operations per second are subject to competition for ever-increasing power, especially between China, the United States, Europe and Japan. Indeed, without these calculation tools, whole swathes of contemporary science are beyond the reach of researchers: simulating the future climate (or tomorrow's weather), designing a spacecraft or an aircraft without going through dozens of expensive tests, studying the thermodynamics of a nuclear reactor or exploring the vastness of data collected on molecular biology and genetics, using the data streams sent by Earth observation satellites etc.