EE HPC State of the Practice Workshop 2020

Energy Efficient HPC State of the Practice Workshop (EE HPC SOP 2020) September 14^th, 2020 - Virtual workshop

In conjunction with Cluster2020 https://clustercomp.org/2020/

The facility demands for supercomputing centers (SCs) are characterized by electrical power demands for computing systems that scale to tens of megawatts (MW) and millisecond power fluctuations approaching 30MW for the largest systems. The demand for primary electrical distribution capabilities to current large-scale facilities can exceed 60MW, comprising multiple, redundant, and diverse medium-voltage feeders. Despite significant pressure on both Moore’s Law and Dennard scaling, the appetite for ever-larger systems and the subsequent demand for both agile power and effective cooling for these systems continues to grow. Computing trends, in terms of highly optimized hardware platforms that may leverage accelerators or other non-traditional components, scalable and high performing applications, and the requirements to manage exponentially larger data sets are driving facility demands not envisioned just a few years ago.

SC facilities must consider multiple elements, including the cost to extend or fit existing primary distribution capabilities; the cost and consequence of both trapped and stranded capacity, ever-increasing heat densities for new systems that may render existing cooling mechanisms obsolete or ineffective, increased mandatory use of liquid cooling for portions of the heat load, and wet weights that exceed the carrying capacities of existing raised floor systems.

Additionally, the operational costs of these facilities must be balanced versus the demand from the systems owners and users for high availability, high utilization, and low-impact facility maintenance and service demands. To achieve this balance, many SCs continue to innovate their operational design practices and technologies. Solutions seek improved management of both the electrical and mechanical systems, and minimizing long-term facility costs through best practices associated with their design.

Some SCs are early adopters and innovators in operational practices and technologies that are geared towards improving energy and power management capabilities. This workshop will explore these operational and technological innovations that span HPC computational systems as well as buildings and building infrastructure.

The purpose of this workshop is to allow for publication of practices, policies, procedures, and technologies in formal peer-reviewed papers so the broader community can benefit from these experiences. It will expose use cases, lessons learned and best practices in design, commissioning and operations. The nature of these papers is generally descriptive with hard experiential data generally gathered through surveys, case studies and research for practice.

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## Workshop Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

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** Electrical power distribution

-- large HPC power loads and rapid power swings

-- electricity service provider relationships with HPC facility

-- facility system design and commissioning

** Power and energy measurement, monitoring and control

-- operational data collection, aggregation and analytics

-- energy and power-aware job scheduling and resource management

-- cooling control systems

-- standards and open interfaces (e.g., Power API, Redfish, GEOPM, READEX, PowerStack)

** Power and energy procurement considerations

-- system requirements (e.g., HPC equipment, software, mechanical systems, facilities)

-- operational costs in procurement

** Liquid cooling

-- standards and open interfaces (e.g., OCP, ASHRAE)

-- facility system design and commissioning

** HPC facility preventative maintenance and management practices for RAS-M (reliability, availability, serviceability, and maintainability)