News Archives

Green Destiny: A 240-Node Energy-Efficient Supercomputer in Five Square Feet

October 28, 2004

Date: Thursday October 28, 2004
Time: 11am-12:15pm
Location: Woodward 149

Wu-chun Feng <[email protected]>
Los Alamos National Lab.

Abstract: Since 1991, the performance per watt of a supercomputer has only improved 300-fold and the performance per square foot only 65-fold. Clearly, we are building less and less efficient supercomputers, thus resulting in the construction of massive machine rooms, and even, entirely new buildings. Furthermore, as these supercomputers continue to follow "Moore's Law for Power Consumption," the reliability of these systems continues to plummet, as per Arrenhius' equation when applied to microelectronics. To address these problems, we constructed Green Destiny, a 240-processor supercomputer that fits in a telephone booth and sips only 3 kilowatts of power. Green Destiny provides reliable supercomputing cycles while sitting in an 80-90 F dusty warehouse at 7,400 feet above sea level, and it does so without any special facilities, i.e., no air conditioning, no humidification control, no air filtration, and no ventilation.

Bio: Dr. Wu-chun Feng --- or more simply, Wu --- is a technical staff member and team leader of Research & Development in Advanced Network Technology (RADIANT) in the Computer & Computational Sciences Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a fellow of the Los Alamos Computer Science Institute. His research interests span the areas of high- performance networking and computing. He received a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Music (Honors) and an M.S. in Computer Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 1988 and 1990, respectively. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.