Head of Next Generation Architectures and Prototypes Group, Jülich Supercomputing Center. Jülich, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
“Are HPC resources used efficiently today, or can we do better?“
Abstract
Idling components on HPC systems constitute a waste of energy, money and natural resources.
Energy can be saved if those components are shut down while not being used, e.g. through intelligent and dynamic power down/up mechanisms. However, the natural resources consumed to produce those devices (and their procurement costs) cannot be recovered this way. Therefore, to improve the overall energy efficiency of HPC systems it seems more reasonable to ensure that all components are put to good use at each moment in time – this will maximize the system throughput by ensuring maximum utilization.
The first question to be asked is therefore: how efficiently are HPC systems used in current practice?
Application restructuring and optimization could bring a significant contribution here, but the volume of legacy code to be tackled means that decades will pass before such improvements become significant on the global HPC scale. What can we do in the meantime? Is there potential for improvement from the system software/middleware and administration side alone? This talk will present an overview of the status quo and collect ideas for future improvements, taking technical limitations and implementation challenges into account.
Bio
Prof. Dr. Estela Suarez is Joint Lead of the department “Novel System Architecture Design” at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, which she joined in 2010. Since 2022 she is also Associate Professor of High Performance Computing at the University of Bonn. Her research focuses on HPC system architecture and codesign. As leader of the DEEP project series she has driven the development of the Modular Supercomputing Architecture, including hardware, software and application implementation and validation. Additionally, since 2018 she leads the codesign efforts within the European Processor Initiative. She holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and a Master degree in Astrophysics from the University Complutense of Madrid (Spain)
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