inside SC09 Guide to Sustainability Activities at SC09
We’ve worked with some of the fine folks (volunteers, every one) on the SC09 committee to bring together all of the activities across the conference related to sustainability in one place, presented here for your planning pleasure. Be sure to read all the way down to the table of events at the end of the post. Good stuff, thanks Natalie!
High Performance Computing is playing a lead role in modeling, simulations and visualization to support primary research, engineering programs and business tools that are helping to create a more “sustainable” future for humankind. Simultaneously, those involved in High Performance Computing are also scrutinizing how to minimize their immediate impact on energy consumption, water consumption, carbon-emissions and other non-sustainable activities.
Sustainability at SC09
The “Sustainability” thrust at the SC09 conference illuminates how High Performance Computing is impacting societies’ drive toward understanding and minimizing the impacts of our activities and in helping search for sustainable solutions that address societal needs and goals. This thrust is highlighted with Al Gore as keynote and his speech on Building Solutions: Energy, Climate and Computing for a Changing World.
This year's Student Cluster Competition has a "Go Green" theme. The event will take place from Monday evening through Thursday in the hallway in Portland — we hope you will stop by and interact with the teams as they've worked very hard to get to the conference.
As our computer centers grow to tens of megawatts in power, of course we are concerned with the impacts of our own activities. At SC09 you will find a “Data Center of the Future” booth, which showcases both current state-of-the art activities in this area as well as new thinking for next generation designs. In the technical program, you will also find numerous technical sustainability focused events that can be categorized into three major topical areas: energy efficiency, energy sources and climate change.
Energy efficiency has the greatest number of sessions and covers both system architecture and the datacenter. The sessions on system architecture are primarily focused on hardware subsystems and include sessions on power management, liquid cooling and flash technology as key drivers for system level energy efficiency. At the system architecture level, however, there are also software subsystems that enable better energy efficiency. One session explores a power performance prediction modeling tool and another suggests the use of application level hardware/software co-tuning for power efficiency. All of the sessions that speak to energy efficiency of the datacenter also explore system architecture with a focus on showcasing and sharing best practices.
From the application perspective, supercomputers are being used to help create a more energy efficient and sustainable world. There are sessions that explore alternative and renewable energy sources as well as better utilization of fossil fuels. One masterworks session calls for the use of new performance tools that are required to help meet the US government’s goal of scaling up wind energy twenty-fold by the year 2030.
Other sessions focus on the urgent and compelling concern about global warming and climate change. Smart 2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in the Information Age is a report that suggests the ICT sector “could deliver approximately 7.8Gt CO2e emissions savings in 2020.” One session discusses how to evaluate the impact of HPC’s net carbon footprint; we can probably quantify HPC’s carbon footprint, but what savings are realized from the results enabled by HPC.
Sustainability schedule
Below is a list of the SC’09 Technical Sessions that have a focus on sustainability. This list is organized broadly by the three topics of energy efficiency, energy sources and climate change. Within each topic, the sessions are listed chronologically.
System Architecture and Datacenter Energy Efficiency
| Sunday | ||
| 08:30 — 12:00 | Tutorial | “Power and Thermal Management in Data Centers” |
| Mon — Thurs | ||
| Lobby Booth | “Datacenter of the Future” | |
| Tuesday | ||
| 10:30 — 10:52 | Challenges | “Low Power Amdahl-Blades for Data Intensive Computing” |
| 05:15 — 07:00 | Poster | “Model-Based Hybrid MPI/OpenMP Power-Aware Computing” |
| 05:15 — 07:00 | Poster | “ClassCloud: Building Energy-Efficient Experimental Cloud Infrastructure using DRBL and Xen |
| 05:30 — 07:00 | Birds of a Feather | “European HPC and Grid Infrastructure” |
| Wednesday | ||
| 02:30 — 03:00 | Exhibitor Forum | “Aurora Highlights: Green Petascale Performance” |
| 04:00 — 04:15 | Doctoral Research | “Energy Efficiency Optimizations using Helper Threads in Chip Multiprocessors” |
| Thursday | ||
| 08:30 — 10:00 | Keynote | “Building Solutions: Energy, Climate and Computing for a Changing World” |
| 10:30 — 12:00 | Panel | “Energy Efficient Data Centers for HPC, How Lean and Green do we need to be?” |
| 12:15 — 01:15 | Birds of a Feather | “Energy Efficient High Performance Computing Working Group” |
| 12:15 — 01:15 | Birds of a Feather | “Green500 List” |
| 01:30 — 02:15 | Masterworks | “Warehouse-Scale Computers” |
| 04:00 — 04:30 | Paper | “A Design Methodology for Domain-Optimized Power-Efficient Supercomputing” |
| 04:00 — 04:30 | Exhibitor Forum | “48V VR12 Solution for High Efficiency Data Centers” |
| Friday | ||
| 08:30 — 10:00 | Panel | “Flash Technology in HPC: Let the Revolution Begin” |
Energy Sources
| Tuesday | ||
| 10:30 — 11:15 | Masterworks | “HPC and the Challenge of Achieving a Twenty-Fold Increase in Wind Energy” |
| 11:15 — 12:00 | Masterworks | “The Outlook for Energy: Enabled with Supercomputing” |
| 05:15 — 07:00 | Poster | “Eigenvalue Solution on the Heterogeneous Multicore Cluster for Nuclear Fusion Reactor Monitoring” |
Climate Change
| Tuesday | ||
| 05:15 — 07:00 | Poster | “High-Impact Tropical Weather Prediction with the NASA Coupled Advanced Multi-Scale Modeling and Concurrent Visualization Systems (CAMVis)” |
| Thursday | ||
| 10:30 — 11:15 | Masterworks | “Toward Climate Modeling in the ExaFlop Era” |
| 11:15 — 12:00 | Masterworks | “Green Flash: Exascale Computing for Ultra-High Resolution Climate Modeling” |
| 12:15 — 01:15 | Birds of a Feather | “HPC Saving the Planet, One Ton of CO2 at a Time” |
