Energy Efficiency on Scalable Computing Architectures

Nowadays, power consumption in computer systems is an active and important subject of discussion in both research and political communities. Indeed, increasing the performance of such computer systems frequently requires increasing the number of resources, thus leading to higher power consumption and a negative impact on the environment. Some strategies to reduce the energy consumption are based on hardware modifications, the usage of energy-aware software and new rules of computation resources utilization. This paper analyzes the energy consumption of HPC platforms and Grid computing infrastructures from two different perspectives: (i) cost in energy due to idle/active status and (ii) cost in energy due to data transfer.