9:15 On Energy Efficient Petaflop Computing – D. Poulikakos (ETHZ)
The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry must play a key role in the global effort to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions as it consumes 2% of the world energy with a strong, demand-driven, upward trend. The IT industry already strives to digitally control and to optimize emission-intensive hardware and software processes. With computation becoming the third pillar of scientific enquiry along with experiment and theory in all scientific disciplines, it becomes essential to address the challenge of energy aware and low power High Performance Computing (HPC).
The goal of the project AQUASAR presented in this lecture is to demonstrate, the employment of an emerging processor architecture, exhibiting a higher efficiency in terms of MFlops/W, for the solution of challenging scientific problems and to harness the heat that is inevitably generated as close as possible to the source with a high temperature level. This allows, for example, the heat to be re-used for space heating or process heat, thus replacing combustion or other process at the second user and offsetting the carbon dioxide emission by the generation of electricity. The goal is to demonstrate a high performance, low power consumption datacenter/computing operation approaching zero net emission. A number of important basic thermal engineering research questions covering a multiplicity of scales need to be answered, exemplified by the nanomanufacturing of low power high performance electronics with novel materials and processes, minimizing thermal resistances also in atomically flat interfaces and realizing 3D integrated cooling of electronics. Progress on these and other related topics will be discussed in the course of the lecture.