The energy
consumption of supercomputers is getting out of hand.
Supercomputers
are becoming ever more important in scientific research, the financial world
and big business. Their processing speed keeps growing. But even if we take
into account future energy-saving technologies, the electricity use of these
machines will become an insurmountable obstacle in 10 to 15 years time - says
Alan Gara, developer of the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Designer of IBM fears that in 10 to 15 years supercomputers will consume as much energy as a jumbo jet taking off."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last week, Europe’s fastest supercomputer was
installed in the German Jülich Supercomputing Centre. The machine contains over
65,000 processors and a calculation power of 220 teraflops per second – all
this is housed in 16 racks the size of a telephone box, and tied together with
10,000 metres of cables.
The machine
is the first European specimen of the newest generation of supercomputers that market
leader IBM presented in June: the Blue Gene/P. It concerns a modest version. IBM
also sells a model that incorporates almost 300,000 processors in 72 racks,
good for a calculation speed of 1 petaflop per second. This machine can also be
combined into a supercomputer with almost 900,000 processors in 216 racks, and
a calculation speed of 3 petaflops a second.
10,000 light bulbs
This
calculation speed is staggering. But so is the energy use: 40 kilowatts for one
rack. The machine in Germany consumes around 600 kilowatts of
electricity – this is equal to 10,000 60-watt light bulbs. The energy use of
the machines with a calculation speed of 1 and 3 teraflops rises to
respectively 2.8 and 8.6 megawatts. That amount of energy needs to be doubled to
account for the cooling that is needed to keep these machines running cool
enough to operate. Aside from that, the calculators also produce near to 90
decibels of noise.
Nevertheless,
the new IBM-supercomputer is extremely economical. It consumes per flop roughly
ten times less electricity than its predecessor, the Blue Gene/L. The two-year
old supercomputer of IBM in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California,
currently number 6 on the list of fastest supercomputers worldwide, consumes
(cooling included) 7.5 megawatts for a calculation speed of ‘only’ 76 teraflops.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Supercomputers
are becoming ever more important in scientific research, the financial world
and big business."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In spite of
this considerably larger energy-efficiency, Alan Gara (the main architect of
the Blue Gene Series) fears that the rising energy use of supercomputers will
become an insurmountable problem in 10 to 15 years. He passed this sentence recently,
during a conference in Germany (article in German). Gara poses that the calculation
speed of the machines will keep rising, to about 200 petaflops per second
between 2015 and 2020. But these machines will – even considering a 20 times
more economical technology – consume up to 50 megawatts. This is as much as a
Boeing 747 taking off.
Global warming research
Supercomputers
are becoming ever more important in scientific research and business. They are
used in domains like particle physics, nuclear fusion, genetics, material
science, sociology and global warming – the latter is quite ironic because in
some time supercomputers will have to apply the influence of their own energy
use on global warming.
Supercomputers
are also used for product development (like the development of cars and planes)
and for the processing of the enormous amounts of information in the financial
world. And the faster the machines become, the more applications appear and the
more demand rises.
No solution
Alan Gara
also said at the conference that at the moment there is “not one” solution in
sight – we need a completely new computing technology. But he believes that
engineers will find it once energy use becomes an acute problem.
© Kris De Decker (edited by Vincent Grosjean)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LINKS :
Supercomputers top 500 : arranged by processing power
Supercomputers top 500 : arranged by energy efficiency
READ MORE :
Computing without electricity : mechanical calculators
The right to 35 mobiles : the energy consumption of the mobile phone network
Second hand bits and bytes : why reselling digital products is not allowed
Water eats energy : if we count on the oceans to fulfill our water needs, we may safely double predictions on future energy consumption
Main page / Site map / Search / Subscribe to feed
or email
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
