HPC Data Center Sustainability and System Energy Efficiency Challenges

With movement towards a carbon neutral and sustainable economy, the landscape of HPC system management and optimization is changing rapidly. Raising energy prices leading to concerns of increased OPEX, regulatory concerns around data center sustainability (reduction of carbon footprint, total power burden on the grid), and the expected increase in system power consumption with upcoming technologies require a fresh take on data center and system operation and power/energy management. Instead of optimizing for pure performance, HPC data centers face moral, political, and economic incentives to reduce the impact of HPC systems resource consumption while still fulfilling the increasing demand for HPC resources. Already, in some countries, the combined lifetime system power consumption and required CO2 certificates equal or even exceed the system hardware costs. This BoF presents experiences from HPC centers regarding system and data center energy efficiency challenges and seeks those interested in hearing about or sharing experiences with dynamic power and energy management. It is important to get the community together to share solutions and educate each other about the challenges, success stories, and use cases. Five HPC data centers will highlight different aspects of the sustainability challenge which, together, will provide a high-level overview of the complex environment to the community. Possible topics are: Data center power/cooling limitation, running a hardware over-provisioned system; Role of supercomputing in net-Zero emission efforts; Improving system energy efficiency through system “right” sizing; Standardization challenges for power and energy management; Energy based accounting passed onto the users