green-hpc

Green HPC

This course introduces environmental sustainability principles in the context of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems.

The course material will give you the ability to understand carbon emissions arising from use of HPC system and how to quantify them. We will use practical examples and real data from an existing HPC facility to illustrate the concepts.

Understanding the scale of emissions from different sources within HPC is critical to knowing how HPC can be made more environmentally sustainable.

We use the ARCHER2 UK National Supercomputing Service as an example throughout this course but the principles and learning should be applicable to any HPC system. After completing this lesson you should have the following knowledge.

Be able to understand the concept of carbon efficiency and how it relates to energy efficiency - including cases where the latter can be at odds with the former;
How HPC systems can potentially reduce carbon emissions;
Understand carbon intensity of electricity generation and the implications for carbon aware use of HPC;
Appreciate the embodied carbon emissions associated with HPC hardware and how they impact carbon aware use of HPC;
Be aware of the frameworks used to measure and report on carbon emissions and how the terms used in these frameworks map onto HPC;
Gain practical advice on how you can measure and improve the carbon efficiency of your use of HPC.

See below for links to lectures and exercises.

This site is open source. Improve this page.