Energy Efficiency Evaluation and Benchmarking of AFRL's Condor High Performance Computer

摘要

Emerging supercomputers strive to achieve an ever increasing performance metric at the cost of excessive power consumption and heat production. This expensive trend has prompted an increased interest in green computing. Green computing emphasizes the importance of energy conservation, minimizing the negative impact on the environment while achieving maximum performance and minimizing operating costs. The Condor Cluster, a heterogeneous supercomputer composed of Intel Xeon X5650 processors, Cell Broadband Engine processors, and NVIDIA general purpose graphical processing units was engineered by the Air Force Research Laboratory s Information Directorate and funded with a DoD Dedicated High Performance Computer Project Investment (DHPI). The 500 TeraFLOPS Condor was designed to be comparable to the top performing supercomputers using only a fraction of the power. The objective of this project was to determine the energy efficiency as a function of performance per Watt of Condor.