Reducing the power consumption of High Performance Computing

The Oxford e-Research Centre has been awarded a JISC grant to develop software which reduces the power consumption of High Performance Computing Clusters. Such systems typically operate at less than 100% capacity and unused nodes in the cluster continue to draw a significant level of power and cooling. 

Oxford Supercomputing Centre (OSC) has developed in house software which intelligently powers nodes in the clusters on and off to meet the demand of jobs at any given time eliminating and reducing waste power and cooling by 10-20%.

The project, led by Jon Lockley, Tolis Sisiaridis and Kate Pitts, builds on an existing prototype running on the current OSC systems. The JISC funding is part of the GreenICT programme and and will allow OSC to extend the software to run on a wider variety of clusters and their software infrastructure. It will also be open source and freely available to use and extend by anyone in the HPC community.