2023-09-11 03:30:10
The more powerful they are, the more energy supercomputers consume. In this era of sobriety, the proliferation of these IT behemoths seems anachronistic. Are high performance and low consumption necessarily contradictory?
In the global battle of supercomputers, it is up to whoever consumes the least energy. The race for “green HPC” (for High Performance Computing, or high performance computing) is all the rage. As of June 2023, according to the international ranking Green500, it is the American supercomputer Henri, made in China (by Lenovo) but with American chips (Nvidia and Intel), which is the most energy efficient with 65.40 gigaflops per watt (Gflops/W). Installed at the Flatiron Institute in New York, it still emits tens of tons of CO2 per day!
However, it may seem paradoxical to contribute to climate change when you calculate in a fraction of a second on a single Nvidia graphics chip – with its FourCastNet machine learning model – seven-day or even twenty-day forecasts of the most extreme weather phenomena. .
Energy efficiency
In third place in the world for “super-green” supercomputers is the French Adastra, installed and inaugurated in May 2023 in Montpellier at the National Computer Center for Higher Education (Cines-Genci). Its energy efficiency is 58 Gflops/W, thanks to its American technologies: HPE Cray supercomputer and AMD processors.
Laurent Crouzet, head of the digital infrastructure and services department at the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, explains that Adastra cost 30 million euros. The French IT group Eviden (formerly Atos) comes in tenth position in the Green500 with its BullSequana equipped with American Intel and Nvidia superchips.
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To explain its energy efficiency of 41.4 Gflops/W, Eviden has its own cooling solution, the « direct liquid cooling »which minimizes the overall energy consumption of a system by using hot water up to 40°C. “This allows natural cooling, because there is no longer a need for air conditioners, whereas most of the solutions offered by the competition require the inlet to be at 32°C maximum, which requires coolers”, explains Eviden.
Furthermore, Eviden participated, in the spring – with other investors (the British ARM, the European Union, the European Investment Bank, France 2030 plan and others to come) – in the fundraising of the French start-up SiPearl. Its founder, Philippe Notton, announced that it will present « courant 2024 » Rhea, the first energy-efficient European HPC microprocessor. It is the Taiwanese global giant TSMC which will manufacture it in volume.
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