The Energy Crisis in Supercomputing

38 Computer P u b l i s h e d b y t h e I E E E C o m p u t e r S o c i e t y puters too unreliable for application scientists to use. Unfortunately, building exotic cooling facilities can cost as much as the supercomputer itself, and operating and maintaining the facilities costs even more. As “The Energy-Efficient Green Destiny” sidebar details, the low-power supercomputer that we developed was extremely reliable, with no unscheduled downtime in its two-year lifespan, despite residing in a dusty warehouse without cooling, humidification, or air filtration. The hourly cost of such downtime ranges from $90,000 for a catalog sales operation to nearly $6.5 million for a brokerage operation, according to Contingency Planning Research’s 2001 cost-of-downtime survey. There’s still no guarantee that the supercomputer won’t fail, as Table 1 illustrates. Total cost of ownership now exceeds initial acquisition costs.