Optimizing Performance At 20 Megawatts: Open Problems In Power-Constrained Supercomputing

Barry Rountree, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Stevenson Hall 1300
11:00 AM - 11:50 AM

Through the history of supercomputing, we've been able to assume that, in effect, we can plug each new machine into the wall and expect that there will be enough electricity to run the system. As the fastest machines on the planet make the transition from petaflop to exaflop architectures, this assumption no longer holds: future machines will have hard limits onb the power they are allowed to consume. Performance optimization will have to be done within these power constraints, which leads to several unexpected complications.