Even supercomputers can be "eco-friendly" - Karolina ranked 15th greenest supercomputer in the world

Nowadays, we keep a close eye on the electricity consumption of everything - from household appliances to machinery and equipment in manufacturing plants. The same is true for supercomputers, energy consumption of which is very high due to their performance. “One of the most frequent questions from visitors to our supercomputing centre is about power consumption. For example, the power consumption of the Karolina supercomputer is 800 kW, which is equivalent to the consumption of a small municipality with 2,000 inhabitants. Such high consumption is due to the enormous power of this machine, which, thanks to the latest technologies, is several times more energy efficient than ordinary computers," says Branislav Jansík, IT4Innovations Supercomputing Services Director.

It is therefore no surprise that manufacturers and specialized scientific teams are trying to reduce the energy consumption of supercomputers as much as possible. "In the past, we collaborated with other European universities and industrial partners to develop and implement a methodology for dynamic tuning of supercomputer parameters. This included, for example, tuning processor frequencies when running parallel supercomputing applications. Our method is based on tuning the system for each running program, or different parts of it, to make optimal use of the available computational resources while reducing power consumption. In this way, we are able to reduce the power consumption of supercomputers by up to 20%," adds Lubomír Říha, whose team at IT4Innovations deals with the issue of reducing power consumption in supercomputers.

Just as the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is published every year, the Green500 list is compiled to evaluate supercomputers in terms of energy efficiency. Karolina, the most powerful Czech supercomputer, and its "green" features have earned a great place in the Green500 list. Karolina was ranked the 7th most energy efficient supercomputer in the EU and the 15th most energy efficient worldwide. 

“The next generation of supercomputers will need to use energy-efficient solutions and contribute to environmental goals while delivering world-class supercomputing capabilities," said Anders Jensen, CEO of the pan-European EuroHPC Joint Undertaking involved in the acquisition of Carolina, adding: “In addition, Karolina and all EuroHPC supercomputers will be accessible to European researchers, SMEs, and organisations working on key environmental and climate issues in the coming years. Green and sustainable technologies are a priority for us as part of the European Green Deal's goal of climate-neutral Europe by 2050”.

For more about the Green500 list, see HERE.

The procurement and operation of the EuroHPC supercomputer is jointly funded by the Czech Republic and EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, through the European Union Connecting Europe Facility and the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The procurement of the supercomputer was funded by the OP RDE project entitled IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center – Path to exascale project ID: CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_013/0001791.

 IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center at VSB – Technical University of Ostrava is a leading research, development, and innovation centre active in the fields of High-Performance Computing (HPC), Data Analysis (HPDA), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and their application to other scientific fields, industry, and society. Since 2013, IT4Innovations has been operating the most powerful supercomputing systems in the Czech Republic, which are provided to Czech and foreign research teams from both academia and industry. Together with the CESNET and CERIT-SC institutions, IT4Innovations constitutes e-INFRA CZ, a strategic research infrastructure of the Czech Republic. At present, IT4Innovations runs three supercomputers: Karolina (15.2 PFlop/s, installed in the summer of 2021), Barbora (849 TFlop/s, installed in the autumn of 2019), and the specialised NVIDIA DGX-2 system for artificial intelligence computation, (130 TFlop/s and 2 PFlop/s in AI, installed in the spring of 2019). The Karolina supercomputer, acquired as part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, was the most powerful supercomputer in the Czech Republic on the day of its installation, 69th in the world (on the TOP500 list), and ranked 15th in the Green500 ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers. The first supercomputers installed at IT4Innovations were Anselm (94 TFlop/s, installed in the summer of 2013), and Salomon (2 PFlop/s, installed in the summer of 2015 which will be decommissioned in 2021). The key research areas of IT4Innovations include big data processing and analysis, machine learning, development of parallel scalable algorithms, solution of computationally demanding engineering problems, advanced visualisation, virtual reality, modelling for nanotechnologies, and material design. For more information, see www.it4i.cz.

Media Contact:

Zuzana Červenková, Spokesperson of IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, tel.: +420 602 593 335