Section: Research Program

Energy Application Profiling and Modelization

International roadmaps schedule to build exascale systems by the 2018 time frame. According to the Top500 list published in November 2013, the most powerful supercomputer is the Tianhe-2 platform, a machine with more than 3,000,000 cores. It consumes more than 17 MW for a maximum performance of 33 PFlops while the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has set to 20 MW the maximum energy consumption of an exascale supercomputer  [40].

Energy efficiency is therefore a major challenge for building next generation large scale platforms. The targeted platforms will gather hundreds of million cores, low power servers, or CPUs. Besides being very important, their power consumption will be dynamic and irregular.

Thus, to consume energy efficiently, we aim at investigating two research directions. First, we need to improve the measure, the understanding, and the analysis of the large-scale platform energy consumption. Unlike approaches  [41] that mix the usage of internal and external wattmeters on a small set of resources, we target high frequency and precise internal and external energy measurements of each physical and virtual resources on large scale distributed systems.

Secondly, we need to find new mechanisms that consume less and better on such platforms. Combined with hardware optimizations, several works based on shutdown or slowdown approaches aim at reducing energy consumption of distributed platforms and applications. To consume less, we first plan to explore the provision of accurate estimation of the energy consumed by applications without pre-executing and knowing them while most of the works try to do it based on in-depth application knowledge (code instrumentation  [44], phase detection for specific HPC applications  [49], etc.). As a second step, we aim at designing a framework model that allows interactions, dialogues and decisions taken in cooperation between the user/application, the administrator, the resource manager, and the energy supplier. While smart grid is one of the last killer scenarios for networks, electrical provisioning of next generation large IT infrastructures remains a challenge.