Greening Supercomputers

jaguar-7

The Jaguar supercomputer is plenty powerful, but requires up to 7 megawatts of energy.

Are powerful supercomputers hopelessly un-green?  Last week the UK Meteorological Office made headlines when it was cited as one of the country’s worst polluters, primarily due to the energy requirements of a supercomputer used to predict climate change. This week HPC Wire examines the challenges in greening supercomputer installations, which have escalated as these machines have gotten faster and more powerful, and looks at solutions from Nvidia using programmable graphic processing units (GPUs) to find a balance of power and energy efficiency in case studies at Temple University, Hess Corporation and BNP Paribas.