[1] While most supercomputers use air as their coolant of choice, the Aquasar uses hot water to achieve its great computing efficiency.

The research program was first termed to be: "Direct use of waste heat from liquid-cooled supercomputers: the path to energy saving, emission-high performance computers and data centers."

Beginning in 2009, the three-year collaborative project was introduced and developed in the interest of saving energy and being environmentally-safe while delivering top-tier performance.

A key part of being environmentally friendly was the focus of attempting to lower the output of carbon dioxide emissions.

[citation needed] An academic paper written in 2018 explored the many possibilities for developing new Exascale computing (a higher scale performance of supercomputing).

Due to the high thermal conductivity of water, more heat can be removed from the processing units.

[2] The system employs 6 teraflops (flops are a unit using to determine computing speed) and attains an energy efficiency of about 450 megaflops per watt.

[5] Supercomputer data centers expend 50% of their electrical demands on their conventional air cooling system.

[3] The air cooling system is the main culprit of the high energy consumption of supercomputers.