HPC > Energy & environment
Sustainable supercomputing for a greener future
Mark Stickells outlines a vision for a greener future for HPC in Australia
A
ustralia’s green energy transition cannot take place without high performance computing (HPC) to
drive innovation – but the supercomputing world cannot ignore its own footprint. Supercomputers are essential
infrastructure, critical to allowing scientists to comprehend the impact of climate change at a regional scale as well as global. Understanding the increased risk of
tropical storms, floods and bushfires at a scale of 4km instead of 150km will save lives and communities by informing more resilient building codes, recognising future demand for heating or cooling, and supporting investment decisions in infrastructure, planning and regional development. It took scientists just 200 days
to develop a Covid-19 vaccine – a remarkable feat of medical research that would not have been possible without supercomputers. Our comprehension of the universe grows ever greater through the huge volumes of astronomical data our systems process. The need for HPC is clear – but our
sector is also one of the biggest users of energy and resources in the world, and it has reached a tipping point. There are more than one trillion
14 Scientific Computing World Summer 2023
transistors for every single person on Earth, and information technology uses around 8% of the world’s electricity, according to the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies. That figure is doubling every 10 years, with most of that consumption ‘out of sight’ in factory-sized data centres (or server farms), which account for up to 3% of electricity use. If consumption were to stay on this trajectory, IT would use all the energy produced by the world by 2049. The Pawsey Supercomputing Research
Centre in Perth is tackling these challenges with our own supercomputer, and the learnings may be useful for other high-energy users.
‘The need for HPC is clear – but our sector is also one of the biggest users of energy and resources in the world, and it has reached a tipping point’
Three elements need to blend
together and work as one to support supercomputing without reducing its capability – sustainable energy, design and engineering, and optimised use. Pawsey’s new supercomputer, Setonix, is not only vastly more powerful than its predecessor, but it is also 30 times more energy-efficient, leading it to be named in the world’s top five ‘greenest’ supercomputers.
It runs a 120kW Solar Array, which
provides sufficient power to offset the electricity used by the pumps to run our groundwater cooling process, which has saved approximately 70 million litres of water since its inception almost 10 years ago. We have designed our facility and its
systems to minimise energy use and constantly challenge ourselves around sustainability, which includes developing models for allocating computing resources based on energy used to reward efficient or optimised algorithms and codes. But even with advances in energy efficiency, Pawsey estimates it would have
been responsible for 7,762 tonnes of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere last year – the same as about 1500 homes. High performance computing demands
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