Green HPC: From Nice to Necessity

T he idea of green high-performance computing (HPC) has been gaining traction over the past fi ve years. In November 2008, the Green 500 list (www.green500.org) was introduced to “raise awareness about power consumption, promote alternative total cost of ownership performance metrics, and ensure that supercomputers only simulate climate change and not create it.” The Green 500 lists the world’s most energyeffi cient supercomputers, based on a fl oating point operations per second (fl ops) per watt metric. Although the list has helped raise awareness of energy effi ciency for HPC, since its inception, more dramatic drivers for energy-effi cient HPC have arisen. Historically, HPC system power consumption has been of secondary importance, but as the HPC community looks from petascale to exascale, power will become a fi rst-order concern. 1521-9615/10/$26.00 © 2010 ieee