Green Supercomputing Comes of Age

Wu-chun Feng

Abstract

When Green Destiny, a highly energy-efficient supercomputer, debuted in early 2002, the applications community embraced the solution as being revolutionary. In contrast, the systems folks in high-performance computing (HPC) greeted GreenDestiny with ridicule and scorn despite having squeezed a 240-node cluster into five square feet and a thermal power envelope of only 3.2 kW (i.e., two hairdryers). Green Destiny provided reliable supercomputing cycles while sitting in an 85-degree F dusty warehouse at 7,400 feet above sea level, and it did so without any special facilities, i.e., no cooling, no humidification control, no air filtration, and no ventilation. In the five years since, power and cooling have finally become first-class design constraints in HPC due to their effect on total cost of ownership as well as efficiency, reliability, and availability (ERA). Thus, this talk will present the evolution of Green Destiny from an architecturally based low-power approach to a software-based approach that runs on commodity processors. The talk will then reflect on how such software-based techniques might be pushed back down into hardware.

Biography

Wu-chun Feng is an Associate Professor of Computer Science with a courtesy appointment in Electrical & Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech (VT). He also directs the Synergy Laboratory at VT. Previous professional stints include The Ohio State University, Purdue University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Orion Multisystems, Vosaic, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, NASA Ames Research Center, and most recently, Los Alamos National Laboratory. His research interests encompass high-performance networking and computing, high-speed monitoring and measurement, low-power and power-aware computing, and bioinformatics. He has approximately 150 peer-reviewed technical publications, and his work has been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, and BBC News. He received a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering and in Music (Honors) in 1988 and an M.S. in Computer Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 1990. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996. He is a senior member of the IEEE and was listed on HPCwire's Top People to Watch List in 2004.