Editorial for the second international conference on energy-aware high performance computing

Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory ranks first in the November 2012’s TOP500 list and achieves an impressive 17.59 Petaflops on the Linpack benchmark using 560,640 cores. Such an amount of performance comes with a price: The power input of about 8 MW would result in an annual electricity bill of more than 8 million Euros based on German price levels. At the same time, the US Department of Energy publishes roadmaps in its Exascale Computing Initiative and puts 20 MW as a “practical power limit” for a future Exaflop computer by the end of this decade. Thus, we are more than a factor of 25 away from our performance goal but today’s technology uses almost half of the acceptable power target. This situation calls for an intensified research in the field of energy efficiency technology, also called Green IT which has found its way into High Performance Computing. Only a few years ago, the community considered HPC as the Formula 1 of computing and ignored the fact of dramatically rising operational costs. However, as with these race cars, we conceived means to reduce power consumption and at