Large-Scale and Extreme-Scale Computing with Stranded Green Power: Opportunities and Costs
Power consumption and associated carbon emissions are increasingly critical challenges for large-scale computing. Recent research proposes exploiting stranded power-uneconomic renewable power-for green supercomputing in a system called Zero-Carbon Cloud (ZCCloud). These efforts studied production supercomputing workloads on stranded-power based computing resources, demonstrating their achievable productivity. We explore economic viability of stranded-power based supercomputing, using three datacenter total-cost-of-ownership (TOO) models to study cost-effectiveness. These studies show that ZCCloud's approach can be cost-effective in the USA today, and is even more attractive in regions with higher power prices (e.g., Japan, Germany), achieving cost advantages as large as 50 percent. Environmental and power-grid benefits are a further advantage. We also explore the sensitivity of these results to changes in hardware TOO; cheaper hardware or longer lifetimes magnify the attractiveness of stranded-power based approaches, yielding advantages as large as 91 percent. These results are robust across different TCO models. Lastly, we study extreme-scale supercomputers ( >100 MW), finding stranded-power can increase peak capability per cost by as much as 80 percent.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- National Science Foundation (NSF); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) (SC-21)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-06CH11357
- OSTI ID:
- 1464632
- Journal Information:
- IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems Journal Issue: 5 Vol. 29; ISSN 1045-9219
- Publisher:
- IEEECopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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