HPCwire: Mine is Greener Than Yours

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Features

November 06, 2008

Mine is Greener Than Yours

by John E. West, for HPCwire

Supercomputing vendor SiCortex has long trumpeted the power-, cooling-, and space-friendliness of its HPC gear. Over time it's added those advantages together to create a picture of eco-friendly HPC, and it's reinforced the message in special events where it uses pedal power from teams of bicyclists to power its boxes. This week the company is introducing a new metric, the Green Computing Performance Index, that assesses the performance of individual supercomputers based on the ratio of their performance on the HPC Challenge benchmark to power consumption.

Although the broader IT community has whipped itself into a foamy eco-green froth over the past two years, the conversation about the ecological impact of computing is still fairly new in HPC. The only major community effort to assess the impact of supercomputing on the ecosystem thus far has been the Green500 List, which didn't get started until November 2007. The Green500, curated by Wu-chun Feng and Kirk W. Cameron, uses performance figures from the TOP500 List and divides them by the total power draw of the machine. Power is either peak (indicated in gray on the Green500 Web site) or measured according to a methodology described on the Web site.

This approach carries with it a significant advantage, namely the TOP500 list itself. The list is well-understood and widely quoted. Most serious HPC organizations submit results to it, and so the Green500 team has been able to build upon the momentum that the TOP500 team has established over many years. However using the TOP500 List as the performance basis also brings along the disadvantage of that list: it uses a sole performance benchmark, the Linpack, which is often observed to be inadequate to characterize a supercomputer's usefulness on real world problems.

The team at SiCortex addressed this shortcoming of the Green500's approach by adopting the benchmark suite that was developed to address the deficiencies of the Linpack itself: the HPC Challenge Benchmark. The HPCC consists of seven tests, each of which stresses various aspects of a machine's architecture, including the same floating point performance measure used on the TOP500 list plus additional tests that measure memory bandwidth and interprocessor communication as well as floating point performance in more complex computational kernels.

Results from an HPCC run are divided by the power consumed in kilowatts -- again, either measured or peak -- to yield SiCortex's proposed index, the Green Computing Performance Index or GCPI. John Goodhue, SiCortex's CTO and a member of the team doing the thinking on the GCPI, recognizes that there are a variety of ways that individual consumers might need to see this information, and the metric admits three different ways to compute the GCPI.

First, one can compute the GCPI on a benchmark-by-benchmark basis. For example, dividing the performance of the Cray XT4 at the ERDC MSRC on the single STREAM triad metric reported at the HPCC Web site by its power consumption yields 129.4 GB/(s*kW). This approach gives a detail-rich view, with multiple measures that reveal the various dimensions of power efficiency, and permit fine-grained analysis of a system's green computing performance.

For those who need more of a shorthand, or who only need the overall picture, the measurements can be combined into a single GCPI number for a machine using an average of the GCPIs resulting from a complete HPCC run. Finally, users may decide to selectively include only the portion of the HPCC that matter most to them, or to weight the components individually, to form a "roll your own" metric to serve a set of highly specialized needs. The flexibility of SiCortex's approach is valuable because it provides a path to preserve the "one number" convenience of both the TOP500 and the Green500 while preserving more levels of detail for later analysis.

SiCortex recognizes that, if the GCPI is to be broadly accepted and used by the community, they cannot be the owners and maintainers of the measure. According to Goodhue, SiCortex is in active discussions with several third parties to own the metric and host its governing body. "At that point," says Goodhue,"we won't have anything to do with it other than by participating in the GCPI organization and submitting results for our machines."

Although SiCortex isn't talking publicly about organizations it is in talks with, one potential partner is The Green Grid. The Green Grid (covered in an HPCwire feature earlier this year) is a relatively new organization focused on improving energy efficiency in datacenters and "business computing ecosystems." After nearly two years, the organization has over 150 members, including power companies, hardware vendors, and end user organizations. Their strategy is focused on the datacenter as a whole, but when I talked with them earlier this year, they could foresee a time when they might be interested in driving their focus down further. This is still probably a little early for them, but if someone else has done the legwork, it might make sense.

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Top Headlines

IBM Releases Energy Efficient Power7 System

Feb 09 | eWeek Europe | Company says new high-end servers will deliver "intelligent performance." Read more...

Inductive Coupling Packs Flash Drive in a Chip

Feb 09 | EE Times | Wireless technology promises energy-efficient chip-to-chip communication. Read more...

IBM, Microsoft Help Create Montana Supercomputer

Feb 08 | eWeek | A new kind of Rocky Mountain high. Read more...

AMD Aims for GPUs in Mainstream Servers Starting 2012

Feb 08 | Computerworld | Chip maker hopes to bring CPU-GPU processors to servers in two years. Read more...

Graphene Transistors That Work at Blistering Speeds

Feb 05 | Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

Appro Assists LLNL with Cluster Designed for Extreme Scale Visualization

Jan 11 | | LLNL is home to some of the fastest computers in the world. In 2012, LLNL expects to have the Sequoia supercomputing cluster operational with a projected performance of over 20 PFLOP/s. These systems will focus on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running large suites of complex simulations and then comparing model predictions with experimental data. To visualize this project’s large amount of data, LLNL requested an Appro Supercomputing Cluster specifically designed to support interactive data analysis.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html