Power/energy use cases for high performance computing

Abstract

Power and Energy have been identified as a first order challenge for future extreme scale high performance computing (HPC) systems. In practice the breakthroughs will need to be provided by the hardware vendors. But to make the best use of the solutions in an HPC environment, it will likely require periodic tuning by facility operators and software components. This document describes the actions and interactions needed to maximize power resources. It strives to cover the entire operational space in which an HPC system occupies. The descriptions are presented as formal use cases, as documented in the Unified Modeling Language Specification [1]. The document is intended to provide a common understanding to the HPC community of the necessary management and control capabilities. Assuming a common understanding can be achieved, the next step will be to develop a set of Application Programing Interfaces (APIs) to which hardware vendors and software developers could utilize to steer power consumption.