Seager, Mark | Engineering Papers

DOE OSTI2011

Alternative Energy Solutions

How can HPC centers reduce cost and environmental impact by making creative use of local natural resources? Energy efficiency inside the data center is only part of the story. In keeping with the principle of reduce, reuse, recycle, we should be able to take advantage of local resources to increase efficiency either at new or existing locations. Are there creative ways to reduce PUE below 1? Is a more meaningful way needed to express and measure the environmental effects of operating HPC centers? We will explore approaches such as sustainable energy sources, use of ambient external air or water temperatures, and reuse of "waste" heat.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

NASA NTRS1996

Cooperative high-performance storage in the accelerated strategic computing initiative

The use and acceptance of new high-performance, parallel computing platforms will be impeded by the absence of an infrastructure capable of supporting orders-of-magnitude improvement in hierarchical storage and high-speed I/O (Input/Output). The distribution of these high-performance platforms and supporting infrastructures across a wide-area network further compounds this problem. We describe an architectural design and phased implementation plan for a distributed, Cooperative Storage Environment (CSE) to achieve the necessary performance, user transparency, site autonomy, communication, and security features needed to support the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). ASCI is a Department of Energy (DOE) program attempting to apply terascale platforms and Problem-Solving Environments (PSEs) toward real-world computational modeling and simulation problems. The ASCI mission must be carried out through a unified, multilaboratory effort, and will require highly secure, efficient access to vast amounts of data. The CSE provides a logically simple, geographically distributed, storage infrastructure of semi-autonomous cooperating sites to meet the strategic ASCI PSE goal of highperformance data storage and access at the user desktop.

Gary, Mark↗