4th International Workshop on Sustainable Supercomputing

Providing a sustainable path for supercomputing is a pressing topic for our community, industry, and governments. Supercomputing has an insatiable appetite for computational cycles, while we face increasing challenges of delivering performance per Watt advances with silicon technology trends. All within the context of climate change, the drive towards net-zero, and economic pressures driven by geo-political challenges.

Improving the sustainability of supercomputing provides many opportunities when the end-to-end cycle is considered. From the design of computational circuits and systems; to the power and cooling that is used to operate them, along with the suite of software tools used to administrate, maintain, and raise operational efficiency of HPC systems. All elements of the system must be considered, from compute nodes and interconnects to IO and storage components of the system.

This workshop will being together users, researchers, hardware and software developers to address opportunities and challenges of sustainability in the supercomputing context.

The current landscape of core processing technologies used within supercomputing systems is showing significant increase in power consumption. At the same time, organizations are increasingly being called upon to consider sustainability issues associated with their operations. Without addressing sustainability issues, the supercomputing community will be challenged to continue to justify the investments needed to move the industry forward to be able to tackle key applications and workloads requirements that grand challenge problems require.

As new supercomputers are deployed, there are more and more questions to be answered regarding sustainability topics including choice of materials, power sources, and overall efficient energy usage. Increasingly organisations operating supercomputing facilities are needing to provide a full lifecycle viewpoint on the sustainability of the facility.

This workshop will help address challenges in raising awareness of the capabilities that can help supercomputing centers be prepared to meet the carbon emission reductions and achieve the levels of energy efficiency that their funding sources may increasingly require in the future. The only way to quantify improvements is through consistent measurement and tracking of key data, providing the visibility to drive change. Achieving a transformation in emission reductions applies to both downstream energy footprint (approximately 66% of emissions) and upstream embedded carbon in products (approximately 33% of emissions).

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Organizers:

• Michael Woodacre
• Michele Weiland
• Pekka Manninen
• Jim Rogers
• Fumiyoshi Shoji