Month: April 2016

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WG Hadrien Croubois: Toward an autonomic approach of workflows distribution on cloud

2016-04-19 Hadrien Croubois

Title: Toward an autonomic approach of workflows distribution on cloud ;

Speaker: Hadrien Croubois

Abstract: Advances in distributed systems technologies require a constant rethinking of previous deployments methods. Development of the Cloud paradigm is symptomatic of a broader tendency toward more dynamicity in the management of tasks and resources. However, the scientific computing still mostly uses old paradigms when deploying complex workflows. Our focus is therefore to propose a solution that will make the link between the needs of user in terms of scientific computation and the features offered by cloud providers. After having modelled both those needs and features, we describe the different mechanisms which are part of what should allow for an autonomous platform dedicated to collaborative scientific computing.

PDF: slides

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WG Issam Raïs: An analysis of the feasibility of energy harvesting with thermoelectric generators on petascale and exascale systems

2016-04-16 Issam Raïs

Title: An analysis of the feasibility of energy harvesting with thermoelectric generators on petascale and exascale systems;

Speaker: Issam Raïs

Abstract: The heat induced by computing resources is generally a waste of energy in supercomputers. This is especially true in very large scale supercomputers, where the produced heat has to be compensated with expensive and energy consuming cooling systems. An analysis of the feasibility of energy harvesting with thermoelectric generators on petascale and exascale systems; Energy is a critical point for future supercomputing trends that currently try to achieve exascale, without having its energy consumption reaching an important fraction of a nuclear power plant. Thus, new ways of generating or recovering energy have to be explored. Energy harvesting consists in recovering wasted energy. ThermoElectric Generators (TEGs) aim to recover energy by converting wasted dissipated energy into usable electricity. By combining computing units (CU) and TEGs at very large scale, we spotted a potential way to recover energy from wasted heat generated by computations on supercomputers. In this paper, we study the potential gains in combining TEGs with computational units at petascale and exascale. We present the technology behind TEGs, the study of a typical supercomputer environment, and finally our results concerning binding TEGs and computational units in a petascale and exascale system. With the available technology, we demonstrate that the use of TEGs in a supercomputer environment could be realistic and quickly profitable, and hence have a positive environmental impact.

PDF: Thermoelectricity