Paper Info
Title
The L-CSC cluster: Optimizing power efficiency to become the greenest supercomputer in the world in the Green500 list of November 2014
Abstract
The L-CSC Lattice Computer for Scientific Computing is a general purpose compute cluster built with commodity hardware installed at GSI. Its main operational purpose is Lattice QCD LQCD calculations for physics simulations. Quantum Chromo Dynamics QCD is the physical theory describing the strong force, one of the four known fundamental interactions in the universe. L-CSC leverages a multi-GPU design accommodating the huge demand of LQCD for memory bandwidth. In recent years, heterogeneous clusters with accelerators such as GPUs have become more and more powerful while supercomputers in general have shown enormous increases in power consumption making electricity costs and cooling a significant factor in the total cost of ownership. Using mainly GPUs for processing, L-CSC is very power-efficient, and its architecture was optimized to provide the greatest possible power efficiency. This paper presents the cluster design as well as optimizations to improve the power efficiency. It examines the power measurements performed for the Green500 list of the most power-efficient supercomputers in the world which led to the number 1 position as the greenest supercomputer in November 2014.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.14529/jsfi150304
Supercomputing Frontiers and Innovations: an International Journal
Field
DocType
Volume
Electrical efficiency,Memory bandwidth,Supercomputer,Electricity,Efficient energy use,Computer science,Total cost of ownership,Parallel computing,Lattice QCD,Computer cluster
Journal
2
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
Supercomputing frontiers and innovations, vol. 2 , no. 3, 2015
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
4
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
David Rohr1242.94
gvozden neskovic200.34
v lindenstruth3135.62