Building Green Supercomputers

Datacenters were responsible for 1.2 percent of the United States’ electricity usage in 2005, or the equivalent of five nuclear power plants. This is an increase of 100 percent from 2000.  At current growth rates, by 2020 the carbon footprint of datacenters will surpass that of the aviation industry. SiCortex is in the business of green high productivity computing (HPC), with desk side systems that draw less power than a PC, up to supercomputers that can compete with a Cray for processing speed, but which take up a single, self-contained cabinet and need only a single 3-phase plug. 

This innovative start up had been successful selling to universities, research labs and government facilities by talking technology;  they realized that their sales cycles could be easier if they could talk to lab IT managers about cost savings.  They needed a white paper that addressed the total cost of operations of running a HPC facility and explained how SiCortex and its low-power architecture could reduce lab computing costs by more than 60 percent annually.   

The interesting thing about this assignment was that many of their technical papers and data sheets contained references to business value, but the information had not been consolidated into a single document that built a business case addressing total cost of ownership; the data was there, the optics were not. 

 SiCortex is also actively working with industry groups to define a “green index” for computing and is working with experts to make the Green Computing Performance Index (GCPI) a standard for comparing energy efficiency for HPC.  In addition to price performance, SiCortex hopes to make performance-per-kWatt an essential metric for buyers.  This white paper evangelizes the need for such a performance index and is aimed at manufacturers of computer systems and components.