December 22nd, 2008

By John DeFore

The Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, a sixty-plus-year-old lab complex near Chicago, needs an enormous amount of juice to run all its number-crunching computers. But its ratio of computing power to electrical usage just made a leap, thanks to the Blue Gene/P, a supercomputer designed for the Department by IBM.

An announcement last week by Argonne’s Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) trumpeted some impressive stats on the new machine — not least of which, dropped in among talk of teraflops and megawatts, was the news that the lab’s energy-efficient design is saving taxpayers over $1 million a year.

Asked how such savings were achieved, the facility’s director Pete Beckman revealed to us that some of the methods were counter-intuitive — for instance, designing a very green, very fast computer by making its parts run slower than they otherwise might.

“Probably the most signficant way that BG/P saves power,” he said, “is by scaling the frequency of each CPU core to 850Mhz (about 3X slower than my laptop). Power is dramatically reduced when we scale back the clock speed.” To compensate for the lower speed, the designers simply added a lot more CPUs: For ALCF’s Intrepid system, that amounted to 163,840 CPU cores.

Beyond some more technical innovations (having to do with a “system on a chip” approach that eliminates power-hungry connectors and adapter cards) is the easily understood matter of cooling all those hard-working machines. Beckman explains that with most computer designs, “often, computer equipment gets tossed in any space that is available, and then chillers (are) added until the room is sufficiently cold.”

For this installation, “we worked with folks modeling the airflow required to efficiently cool the supercomputer, and then built a structure to enclose the hardware and use high-efficiency air handlers to reduce our power.”

“We also tied into the Argonne chilled water plant,” he adds, “which uses cooling towers to chill the water when the weather is cold. So when it is about 35 degrees outside, we can easily chill water essentially for free!” — a savings of $20,000 to $25,000 a month in electric costs.

And just as the demand for computing power never ceases to grow, Argonne’s interest in greener processing doesn’t end here. “We are already working on the next generation designs for ultra-green supercomputers,” Beckman says, citing plans for direct water-cooling of components and ways to schedule intensive computing activities to occur at times of lower electricity demand.

The ALCF supports scientific research in biology, chemistry, physics, energy and climate science by providing scientists with mega computer power for their inquiries.

Research underway includes projects that address critical health issues like Parkinson’s disease and heart rhythm disorders to climate-related matters, such as a study looking at the effect of global warming on forest ecology and designing reduced-emissions jet engines.

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