Reducing the Power Consumption of HPC Environments

The Kyoto University Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies (ACCMS) promotes research and development using a five-department structure which includes the fields of networks, supercomputing, educational systems utilizing multimedia, and digital academic content, as well as collaborative research. It also functions as a base which incorporates IT platform network centers from eight universities nationwide for joint use and collaborative research, supporting the utilization of its supercomputer system (HPC) and collaborating with researchers in various computational science fields.

This case study reviews the challenges faced by ACCMS of monitoring CPU and memory power consumption to improve HPC power efficiency and power capping to satisfy the facility and social demands and how Intel® Data Center Manager (Intel® DCM) and cluster-type HPC equipped with Intel® Xeon® and Intel® Xeon Phi™  provided solutions including monitoring the temperature and power consumption of each server and reducing power consumption by up to 5-8% through allocation to nodes with high power efficiency.