« Build your own windmill | Main | Solar powered cars »

October 20, 2007

Supercomputers reach their limits

Supercomputerklein

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 :

World_expo_58_3

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

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Found

  • Sustainable energy
    We need numbers, not adjectives (read) (via)
  • Autobahn speed limit
    The fastest your car can go while burning 8 liters per 100 km (around 35 miles to the gallon) (read) (via)
  • T-shirts
    If biofuels are so bad, why aren't we campaigning against cotton? (read)
  • Walking
    My shoes get 220 miles per gallon (read)
  • Cities for living
    Paris is a miraculous city in no small measure because modern architects have not been able to get their hands on it (read) (via)
  • Hydroelectricity
    Dam the Mediterranean (see & read)
  • Marconi news
    Retro-tech juxtapositions & encyclopedic image mechanix (see) (via)
  • Home
    Now that's what I call a tree house (see)
  • The good old days
    I'm not interested in retro, I'm interested in better (read)(via)
  • Get an upgrade
    The energy required to produce a computer is enough to run it for 10 years (see & read) (via)
  • Low-tech writing
    Pen reviews (see & read)
  • Where's the fish?
    Ninety years of industrial-scale exploitation of fish has led to ecological meltdown (read)
  • The telectroscope
    Looking through a transatlantic tunnel (read) (visit) (via)
  • Fitness
    The first gym (see & read)
  • Help in case of an atomic bomb attack
    One reason to get down flat is to let the worst of it pass over you (see & read) (Via)
  • Build an electric car
    Retrofitting a 1970s Fiat 500 (read)
  • Minerals
    “Peak oil” is just one of several cases of worldwide peaking and decline of a depletable resource (read)
  • Travelling light
    Airships are one of several green technologies which might be killed by a shortage of materials (read)
  • Farms became factories
    Chemical corporations continue their propaganda efforts to convince farmers that they cannot make a profit without using chemicals, antibiotics, hormones, and genetically manipulated crops and animals (read)
  • Take it easy
    A 0.5 horse power car (see & read)
  • Robot wars
    Airstrikes from unmanned aircraft over Iraq hit record levels in April (read)
  • TV
    A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken (read)
  • Privacy
    How to kill an RFID tag (read)
  • Insurance versus nature
    In the past five years, London councils alone have chopped down almost 40,000 street trees (read)
  • Long-term storage (2)
    How to make a Moleskine notebook (make)
  • Long-term storage
    It only takes five years and archived data is obsolete (read)
  • Monsanto rules (2)
    Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops (read)
  • Monsanto rules (1)
    Intellectual property thuggery is not restricted to the IT and entertainment industries (read)
  • Time is money
    From New York to Los Angeles in 48 hours (read)
  • Solar
    One of oldest forms of energy used by humans -- sunlight concentrated by mirrors -- is poised to make an astonishing comeback (read)
  • Book of the future
    From stone-age tools to space-age computers (see & read)
  • Food crisis
    What level of meat-eating would be sustainable? (read)
  • Green cars (2)
    Cars like the Aptera are severely impeding humanity's faltering steps towards creating a sustainable society (read)
  • Green cars
    From rainforest to rubber plantation (read)
  • Time capsule
    2000 A.D. (see)
  • Time capsule
    2063 A.D. (read)
  • Green buildings (2)
    It takes 90,000 kWh of energy to construct a single family dwelling (read)
  • Green buildings (1)
    Even if 40% of the materials in a new building are recycled, it would take 65 years for a green, energy-efficient new office building to recover the energy lost in demolishing an existing building (read)
  • Flying
    The revival of propeller-driven planes (read)
  • Water
    Low-tech lemonades (make)
  • The front lawn
    What is that chasm between house and street? Why is it there? Or rather, why is nothing there? (read)
  • Ethanol
    The road to hell is paved with good intentions (read)
  • Wheels
    The car of the future (see)
  • Communications
    Build a telegraph (make)
  • Housing
    Build an eco village (make)
  • Wireless
    Mobile phones more dangerous than smoking? (read)
  • Magnetic levitation
    Germany ditches Transrapid project (read)
  • Writing
    Emoticons on paper (see)
  • Trees versus solar
    What happens when one neighbour with solar panels sues another with big, shady trees? (read)
  • Public transport
    A bus to keep pace with other transportation (see)


  • StumbleUpon