The Kelvin Living Lab: Towards Net Zero High-Performance Computing

The purpose of this project is to evaluate options which reduce the carbon emissions of the Kelvin-2 high-performance computing (HPC) to zero or negative. This will be achieved by improving efficiency, and implementing scheduling and complementary technologies. HPC is a large electricity consumer and has a commensurate cooling requirement which can significantly increase power consumption. Therefore, targeting the processing efficiency and waste heat offers the greatest opportunity to decarbonise. The proposed outputs focus on these options and seek to demonstrate an effective 40% improvement in energy-efficiency with the resulting guidelines made available to other Tier-2 centres. We aim to improve the sustainability of HPC through a multi-pronged approach:

1. Analysing and deploying software and hardware to improve utilisation and energy-efficiency of the infrastructure
In the last two decades, various research has proposed ways to improve energy-efficiency of HPC systems, such as efficient scheduling of parallel applications, dynamic parallelism control and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, including research by the PI and de Supinski, e.g., EP/M01147X/1, EP/L000555/1 and EP/M015742/1. However, these techniques have not transitioned from research to practise due to unknown risks on the service. Our goal is to re-evaluate and adjust such techniques on an isolated slice of the Kelvin-2 system. Additionally, we will explore alternative node architectures as different node architectures may present better energy-efficiency for specific applications. We will moreover investigate if we can leverage dynamic voltage and frequency scaling to help maintain the electrical utility grid's stability, as renewable energy sources reduce the grid's ability to counter dynamic stability problems, which limits their adoption. Based on expertise in time-synchronised instrumentation (OpenPMU), we will explore adaptation of power consumption of HPC infrastructures in real time...