A Power-Aware Cost Model for HPC Procurement
Neha Gholkar, Frank Mueller, Barry Rountree · 2016
With the supercomputing community headed toward the era of exascale computing, power has become one of the foremost concern. Today's fastest supercomputer, Tianhe-2, already consumes 17.8MW to achieves a peak performance of 33.86PFlops [1]. At least an order of magnitude improvement in performance while maintaining the power envelope is required for exascale. Yet, manufacturing variations are increasingly creating a heterogeneous computing environment, even when identical processing components are deployed, particularly when operating under controlled power ceiling. This work contributes a procurement model to aid in the design of a capability system that achieves maximum performance while considering manufacturing variations. It appropriately partitions a single, compound system budget into the CAPEX (infrastructure cost) and the OPEX (operating power cost). Early results indicate that aggressive infrastructure procurement disregarding such operational needs can lead to severe performance degradation, or significant hidden operating cost will be incurred after procurement.