Leibniz Supercomputing Centre Wins HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award for Best Application in Green Computing
Nov. 30 -- The Green IT-efforts of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching near Munich have received cumulative confirmation by the global HPC community: At the Supercomputing Conference 2015 in Austin, TX, the GCS member centre was awarded with the “2015 HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award for Best Application in Green Computing.” The recognition was given for LRZ’s implementation of warm-water direct liquid cooling on its high-performance computing (HPC) installation SuperMUC Phase 1 and Phase 2 to enable year-round chiller-less operations. In conjunction with an energy-aware operating software stack, this results in approximately 40 per cent energy savings over comparable systems.
“LRZ has always been a pioneer in the field of energy efficiency and in green IT. Having our extensive energy reducing efforts appreciated by the HPC-savvy readers of HPCwire fills us with pride as it reaffirms that we are on the right track,” confirms Prof. Dr. Dieter Kranzlmüller, Member of the Board of Directors of the LRZ, who jointly with Dr. Carla Beatriz Guillen Carias, member of LRZ’s Application Support HPC team, accepted the award at SC15 from Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications and publisher of HPCwire. "Our SuperMUC installation delivers proof that it is possible to significantly lower the energy consumption in data centres which results in drastically reduced operating costs.”
At the LRZ, green IT has been an important topic for many years and has evolved into one of LRZ’s central research fields. In addition to the compute, network, and storage components, the energy efficiency of the cooling and air conditioning systems contribute significantly to the overall energy consumption in a data centre. The proven warm water cooling technology, implemented by IBM, was applied to both SuperMUC installations (Phase 1 and Phase 2), which in sum delivers a peak compute performance of 6,77 Petaflops (Quadrillion Floating Point Operations per second).
Through a network of micro channels, the cooling system circulates 45 centigrade warm water over active system components, such as processors and memory, to dissipate heat. Therefore, no additional chillers are needed. The use of the processors featuring latest technologies, which e.g. allow an adaptation of their frequency to the specific needs of the computations, adds to the efforts of reducing the power usage. In combination with the use of energy optimizing operating software these energy saving measures implemented at the Garching supercomputing centre result in an overall reduction of system power usage by approximately 40 per cent over comparable systems.
About GCS
The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) combines the three national supercomputing centres HLRS (High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart), JSC (Jülich Supercomputing Centre), and LRZ (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching near Munich) into Germany’s Tier-0 supercomputing institution. Concertedly, the three centres provide the largest and most powerful supercomputing infrastructure in all of Europe to serve a wide range of industrial and research activities in various disciplines. They also provide top-class training and education for the national as well as the European High-Performance Computing (HPC) community. GCS is the German member of PRACE (Partnership for Advance Computing in Europe), an international non-profit association consisting of 25 member countries, whose representative organizations create a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, providing access to computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level. www.gauss-centre.eu
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Source: GCS
