HPC Procurement, Energy Efficiency and Sustainability

Energy efficiency is no longer just an operational goal; it is a contractual necessity. Procurements have evolved as leadership-class systems push against facility power limits and institutional carbon-neutrality goals. This Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session explores how the world’s leading facilities are using procurement language to drive energy efficiency and sustainability. We will compare three distinct global approaches to buying the next generation of supercomputers; 1. strict engineering constraints and technical enforcement, 2. co-design by early partnering with a vendor, and 3. optimizing between metrics such as performance, energy efficiency, carbon-neutrality and cost effectiveness. We will examine how procurement strategies are evolving from "System N" (current) to "System N+1" (future) at three specific sites from leadership facilities in Europe, the United States and Japan. By comparing "System N" (current) with "System N+1" (future), this session aims to provide facility managers and procurement officers with actionable strategies. We want attendees to understand how leadership facilities have updated their contracts—specifically what they kept, what they changed, and what new requirements they invented—to address the "power wall" and carbon mandates of the post-exascale era. For example, Jim Rogers, from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, will discuss procurements for the Frontier Supercomputer that was installed in 2022 and Discovery (OLCF-6) that is scheduled to be installed in 2028. His topics may include the shift to strict power budgets (e.g., the 30-40 MW cap ), the requirement for application-driven runtime power & energy management", and the mandate for AI-optimized storage. Eric Boyer, from GENCI, will discuss procurements for the Adastra supercomputer at CINES and the upcoming Alice Recoque system at CEA. His topics may include the evolution of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) models to explicitly weigh Operational Expenditures (OPEX) against Capital Expenditures (CAPEX), the use of Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) to determine the optimal operational lifetime of a system, and strategies to balance performance gains with global warming emissions across the full system life cycle. Also, Fumiyoshi Shoji, from RIKEN, will discuss the co-design evolution from Fugaku to its successor, FugakuNEXT. His topics may include the explicit requirement for a "significant improvement in power performance" to accommodate the system's first-ever integration of GPUs, and the challenge of delivering effective simulation performance 5 to 10 times better than Fugaku while establishing the world's highest level of AI capabilities within a sustainable energy envelope.

This session is designed as a “Community Exchange Open Forum”, which will follow presentations with questions like the following: "Looking past Discovery, FugakuNext, and Alice Recoque—for your next system (System N+2) in the 2030s—what is the one procurement clause you don't have today that you wish you could write into a contract? Is it a mandate for 100% renewable power matching? A requirement for recyclable liquid cooling fluid? Or something else?"

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Organizers:

• Ayesha Afzal
• Natalie Bates