Editorial for the First International Conference on Energy-Aware High Performance Computing

摘要

Energy consumption in high performance computing increased dramatically in the last decade and becomes a major obstacle for new installations of compute centres world wide. In Germany for each megawatt sustained power consumption costs of about one million Euros per year are estimated. In addition, the corresponding amount of 8.7 million kWh per year is an ecological problem independent of whether we use green electricity or not. In 2010 petaflops computers have an average power consumption of several megawatts. Current technology would not allow to build ex-aflops machines-they would need a nuclear power plant for the electricity and the electricity bill would be in the billion Euro range. However, looking at the Earth Simulator's data this argument would have been valid for petaflops computers in the early 2000s.