Energy efficiency is a cross disciplinary issue that has only recently caught the attention of the mainstream high performance community. The fastest supercomputers in the world today, consume 2-5 Megawatts of power while running LINPACK. Future exaflop systems may require 100 megawatts of power, nearly the output of a small power plant (300 megawatts). This would supply 1.6 million 60-watt light bulbs, the lighting requirements of a small city, and would cost about 50 Million USD to operate annually. These systems will produce tremendous amounts of heat leading to reduced reliability. If the power is obtained from coal burning power plants, a 100 megawatt exaflop system would be responsible for about 100 metric tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere every year. Thus, power is now a first-class constraint in clusters designed for high performance computing. The continuous challenge is to reduce the power and energy consumption of emergent systems without sacrificing performance. Since 2002, the SCAPE Laboratory has led efforts to improve the power and thermal efficiencies of high-end systems. In this talk we describe the motivation and challenges facing the Green Computing movement in HPC and our continued efforts to build infrastructure to profile, analyze, control, and optimize the energy consumed and thermals produced by high-performance systems and applications.
Kirk W. Cameron received his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Florida (1994) and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Louisianan State University (2000). From 1998-2000 he was a Computer Science researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory. From 2001-2005 he was an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina. He is currently an Associate Professor and Director of the Scalable Performance (SCAPE) Laboratory at Virginia Tech. Prof. Cameron pioneered the area of high-performance, power-aware computing. He was a founding member of SPECPower, the first commercial benchmark effort for energy efficiency and consults regularly with the US EPA to help establish Energy Star ratings for computer servers. He also co-founded the Green500, a list of the most energy efficient supercomputers in the world. Prof. Cameron is a recipient of NSF Career, DOE Career, IBM Faculty Awards, and an invited participant in the NAE Frontiers of Engineering Syposium. In 2007, he was named a research fellow in the Virginia Tech College of Engineering. In 2009, Prof. Cameron joined the editorial board of IEEE Computer and is responsible for their Green IT column which appears 6 times a year.