Power usage of production supercomputers and production workloads

Power is becoming an increasingly important concern for large supercomputer centers. However, to date, there have been a dearth of studies of power usage 'in the wild'-on production supercomputers running production workloads. In this paper, we present the initial results of a project to characterize the power usage of the three Top500 supercomputers at Los Alamos National Laboratory: Cielo, Roadrunner, and Luna #15, #19, and #47, respectively, on the June 2012 Top500 list. Power measurements taken both at the switchboard level and within the compute racks are presented and discussed. Some noteworthy results of this study are that 1 variability in power consumption differs across architectures, even when running a similar workload and 2 Los Alamos National Laboratory's scientific workload draws, on average, only 70-75% of LINPACK power and only 40-55% of nameplate power, implying that power capping may enable a substantial reduction in power and cooling infrastructure while impacting comparatively few applications. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.