HPC@Green It ─ Green High Performance Computing Methods

The authors present methods to reduce computer energy consumption by means of a better usage of a specific set of resources and maximizing the efficiency of the running applications. The processor frequency is adjusted to the needs of the running job, leading to a power drop by a factor of 2 and doubling battery life time of laptops. It is shown how computer resources can be optimally adapted to application needs, reducing job run time. Examples on how to optimize algorithms on single node and parallel RISC architectures are discussed. The job-related data are stored and reused to help computer managers to replace machines.

Ralf Gruber won the Cray Gigaflop Performance Award in 1989 with world’s fastest parallel program running at 1.7 GFlop/s sustained. He was responsible for the Swiss-Tx cluster project, a co-operation between EPFL, Compaq, and Supercomputing Systems. Since 6 years he teaches the doctoral school course on "High Performance Computing Methods".Vincent Keller received his Master degree in Computer Science from the University of Geneva (Switzerland) in 2004, and his PhD degree in 2008 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in the HPCN and HPC Grids fields. Since 2009, Dr. Vincent Keller holds a full-time researcher position at University of Bonn in Germany. His research interests are in HPC applications analysis, Grid and cluster computing and energy efficiency of large computing ecosystems.