Service Life Estimation of Supercomputing Systems based on Low-power Processors

Supercomputing centers have been paying expenses mainly for massive energy consumption required for supercomputer management. Energy consumption is expected to increase with continuous growth of supercomputer use in the future. Low-power processor based supercomputers have been considered as an alternative that can reduce the energy consumption. It was reported that the use of low-power processors in a supercomputer could reduce about 10% of the total energy consumption of a supercomputing center. While many researchers have been endeavored to investigate the advantages of low-power processor use in supercomputing systems, there are limited number of studies examining their service life in the field. In fact, low power processors in a supercomputer should be susceptible to thermo-mechanical and electrical stresses due to their exposure to harsh use conditions compared to their intended conditions, i.e. mobile device applications. These stresses can result in physical failure of low power processors, malfunction of supercomputers, and eventually reduction of supercomputer service life. This paper focuses on estimating the service life of supercomputing systems based on low-power processors.