2nd International Workshop on Energy Efficiency with Sustainable Performance: Techniques, Tools, and Best Practices

This workshop aims to foster the exchange of innovative strategies, tools, and best practices to enhance energy efficiency across modern computing environments. With rising energy costs, increasing CO$_2$ emissions, and mounting pressure on power infrastructure, optimizing energy use has become a crucial priority for sustainable computing infrastructure. EESP workshop will explore how to optimize computing environments by effectively balancing performance, power consumption, and sustainability trade-offs. It will provide participants a comprehensive guidebook featuring strategies tailored for exascale, Tier-1 and Tier-2 supercomputing centers. By learning about how to adopt greener, cost-effective, and energy-efficient practices, attendees will gain a competitive edge in driving sustainability across their systems.

Aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals, the workshop encourages collaboration between HPC and AI communities to promote environmentally responsible innovation. It will provide guidance for system operators and facility managers on reducing Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and sourcing green energy, while supporting users in making energy-conscious decisions through thoughtful experiment design. In addition, EESP emphasizes cross-layer innovation—integrating advances in hardware, software, and runtime systems with data-driven analytics and monitoring—to achieve end-to-end visibility and adaptability in energy use. By providing transparency into energy consumption and CO₂ emissions, users can make informed, sustainability-aware choices. The workshop also emphasizes full-lifecycle sustainability—from system design and operations to reuse and decommissioning—and considers how HPC strategies can support energy-efficient AI infrastructure amid growing convergence. While current tenders often emphasize raw hardware metrics, this workshop highlights the importance of sustained (application) performance, rather than peak performance, as a critical metric for long-term success.

While only a few exascale systems exist, the majority of supercomputing centers worldwide operate at the Tier-2 level. These Tier-2 centers, including many in Germany, often face high power costs and limited budgets for hardware upgrades. As energy efficiency becomes a growing operational bottleneck, bridging the gap between Tier-0/1 and Tier-2 practices is critical. This workshop fosters dialogue between tiers, focusing on adapting energy-saving strategies from Tier-0/1 to Tier-2 environments with limited resources. It will explore financially viable and technically sound solutions for diverse infrastructures—data centers, cloud systems, and HPC clusters. Beyond hardware innovations like liquid cooling, EESP emphasizes software, runtime, and resource management techniques—such as adaptive systems, predictive analytics, and smart workload scheduling. We welcome contributions with operational insights, reproducible case studies, and sustainability metrics beyond energy use, including carbon emissions. By promoting practical, data-driven solutions and benchmarking tools, EESP aims to extend sustainability practices across all tiers.

We aim to attract a diverse audience from academia, supercomputing centers (Tier-0, Tier-1, and Tier-2), industry, national laboratories, and the environmental policy sectors that regularly collaborate to advance innovations in energy and sustainability. With a focus on including underrepresented groups in computing, our target audiences include researchers, practitioners and students in HPC, energy efficiency, sustainability, systems engineering, and performance analysis. Workshop topics will range from software development and hardware design to energy-efficient practices for HPC and cloud data centers.

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Organizers:

• Ayesha Afzal
• Natalie Bates
• Hatem Ltaief
• Bronis R. de Supinski