HPC & Green Computing – Performance, Efficiency, and Sustainability

Modern data centers operate almost autonomously – very little human activity; yet in aggregate, they consume nearly 3% of the global power production. HPC is the most energy-intensive application in the category. The increasing needs of the digital transformation require more capacity from datacenters along with their growing power demands. Interestingly, and an alarming concern, a large part of the world’s energy is still produced by burning fossil fuels.

If appropriately designed, leveraging disaggregated building block architecture, advanced cooling solutions, and advanced power management software HPCs can reduce environmental impact while saving money. The result is lower operating expenditures (OPEX), lower capital expenditures (CAPEX), and a cleaner environment (minimized TCE – total cost to the environment).

In this talk, we will reveal a comprehensive survey from 5,000 IT and HPC professionals and analyze the result implications. We will also discuss how we can achieve high efficiency and sustainability while facing continued performance growth. As examples, several recent highly efficient HPC deployments will be introduced in the presentation.