HPCwire: The Greening of HPC

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June 26, 2008

The Greening of HPC

by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor

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One of the final panel sessions at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) last week focused on "green" supercomputing, a term used to encompass both power efficiency and environmental responsibility. Barely an issue just a couple of years ago, today every IT vendor, HPC or otherwise, is selling green computing in one form or another. With overall IT power consumption expected to grow around 15 percent per year and the pressure on datacenters to accommodate ever-larger systems, energy conserving strategies have become a huge issue in HPC and the IT industry, in general.

Panel chair Horst Simon (LBNL) started the session by noting that even small energy cutbacks can yield large savings over a long period of time. He pointed out the very modest energy saving measures instituted in the U.S. in the mid '70s in response to the oil embargo netted $700 billion of savings over the ensuing 30 years. Although worldwide, IT infrastructure consumes only about 0.8% of energy used, the cost totaled $7.2 billion in 2005. Given the double-digit growth rate of IT power consumption, steps taken today could save billions of dollars over the next decade.

Simon cited a Google report that determined that datacenter energy costs are starting to dominate lifecycle costs. According to this study, energy costs may eclipse acquisition costs for low-end servers after just two years of service. With that in mind, Google and Microsoft are building huge datacenters (tens of megawatts) along the Columbia River to take advantage of cheap hyro-electricity and use the river water for cooling. Ten or fifteen lesser-known IT companies are building similar facilities elsewhere in anticipation of future demand for ultra-scale datacenters. "Clearly the industry is changing and something is going on with power and computing," Simon noted.

Green Destiny

Virginia Tech's Wu-chun Feng was interested in green computing before it became fashionable. In 2002, Feng and his colleagues became interested in developing an energy-efficient HPC system that required minimum cooling. The effort was born out of necessity. Virginia Tech's datacenter wasn't much more than a warehouse. It had little access to cooling, with temperatures in mid-summer rising to 85-90F. Both power and space were limited. The goal was to develop a highly reliable machine that could operate under these harsh conditions; performance was secondary.

In response, Feng's team developed a 240-node cluster, called Green Destiny, based on the highly energy-efficient Transmeta processor (1 GHz TM5800). The entire system used 3.2 kilowatts. The Transmeta chips weren't the fastest chip ever conceived. Green Destiny topped out at 101 gigaflops on Linpack. Even in 2002 that would have placed it in the bottom half of the TOP500. Feng recalled they took some heat about the machine's low performance, causing one colleague to joke that it "runs just as fast when it's unplugged." But the project was a success. In the two-year life of the system, there was no unscheduled downtime.

Other than interest in the exotic Transmeta hardware, Feng's work got little attention. In 2002, HPC was about performance at any cost. Oil was $25 a barrel and not many people were worried about power and cooling costs yet. The conventional wisdom was that Moore's Law would solve everything. "It's interesting to see in five and half years how things have changed," said Feng.

Computing per Watt Has Been Solved

HPC Veteran John Gustafson broke with conventional wisdom, declaring that the computing part of our machines is already highly energy efficient. He noted that the latest ClearSpeed gear delivers 4 gigaflops/watt, and Intel will soon achieve that in mainstream processors. According to Gustafson, the computational elements of a modern HPC system consume just a small fraction of the total power.

He illustrated this by pointing out that a typical Linpack run for a top 10 system uses the equivalent of 20 barrels of oil. The floating point calculation part uses just 0.1 barrel. The rest is used moving data from one point to the other (although he admitted that includes on-chip data movement as well). With that in mind, Gustafson said that industry should now focus on the energy efficiency of data communication. He wants to replace flops with a new metric: "byps" or bytes per second. According to him, measuring byps per watt will give people a much better understanding of the energy efficiency of systems.

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