Energy-Efficiency HPC in the Exascale era, What's Next?

Ever since beginning the pursuit of achieving exascale HPC, the projected power and energy consumption was considered one of the major challenges. Due to the physical limits of silicon technology, exascale would require an infeasible amount of power and energy to invest and operate, and we had work to do. Fast forward to 2021, we are about to see the first generations of exascale HPC systems at the verge of being deployed flipping their switches up and transitioning into operation. Starting from where we were before, this will be a huge achievement from a collective effort throughout the whole HPC community. But what’s next? Now that the challenges of taming the design time considerations are done, are we done? What are the challenges we have left as a legacy as we are going into operating these systems?

As an opening talk into this state of practice workshop, we will explore such questions to see what HPC energy-efficiency would look like at the verge of going into a new era. In particular, sharing the multi-year experience in deploying, operating, and analyzing data from the operational data analytics system that supports cooling operations of Summit, the 200PF pre-exascale supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Facility (OLCF), we aim to peek into the what HPC energy-efficiency would require in the exascale era and discuss trends, challenges and opportunities.

Virtual