The Energy Efficiency of the Jaguar Supercomputer

The growing energy cost has become a major concern for data centers. The metric, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), has been very successful in driving the energy efficiency of data centers. PUE is not perfect, however. It often does not account for the energy loss due to power distribution and cooling inside the IT equipment. In HPC space this is particularly problematic as the newer designs tend to move part of power and cooling subsystems into the IT hardware. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the energy efficiency of the Jaguar supercomputer by taking the above issue into account. It also identifies the technical challenges associated with the analysis.

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