Duke Study Looks at Power Consumption Trends in HPC Clusters

John B. Pormann from Duke University has posted a two-year study of power consumption across 500-600 machines of the Duke Shared Cluster Resource (DSCR). The DSCR is a large Linux cluster – over 4100 CPU-cores – that provides “production-grade” computational capabilities for over 70 research groups and 700 users from all across campus.

As power and cooling become increasingly important to HPC installations, this data suggests that vendors such as Dell and Intel are responding in concrete and meaningful ways, with newer platforms that require less power while providing higher levels of performance.