Designing Green Software for High Performance Computing Clusters

SPRING 2012 RESEARCH INCUBATION AWARDEES

Ayse K. Coskun (Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering), Gunar Schirner (Northeastern University), Martin C. Herbordt (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering)

Energy efficiency is one of the central societal and technical issues today, and has become yet more critical with increased focus on the environment and the world’s climate. Power consumption is also the major limit in improving computing performance. Large computing clusters already have prohibitive operational and cooling costs. In addition, further increases in processor power densities are not viable as they breach the reliable operating temperatures of computing hardware. These limitations on power consumption and cooling are bringing to an end the historic performance scaling in high-performance computing (HPC) centers, which has so far enabled tremendous advancements in solving complex scientific problems.

This project’s research goal is to design systematic, inexpensive methods to optimize the application software for increasing the energy efficiency. HPC software has been traditionally optimized for performance, and little has been done for generating better software for energy efficient operation. As part of the research plan, the project will demonstrate proof-of-concept of novel “green software” techniques on real-life HPC applications.

This work is funded by a Hariri Research Award made in June, 2012.