The Role of HPC in the Renewable Revolution
DescriptionWind and solar are the least expensive means to produce electricity. Tens of gigawatts of new renewable energy have come online in the last decade, and tens of gigawatts will come online in the next decade. Wind and solar energy have two significant challenges that must be overcome: variability and congestion. Variability is obvious. Congestion refers to the fact that electricity has to “travel” from generators to consumers, and that often the wires are “full”. This leaves terawatt-hours of energy stranded due to insufficient transmission capacity.

What is needed are industries that can rapidly vary their electrical load and operate in sparsely populated regions where the energy is produced. HPC/HTC with the right additions, can be that industry. To do so requires that we invert our model of data center power from many nines of availability to a single nine.

The Lancium Compute HPC PaaS combines the benefits of Singularity containerization with the ability to checkpoint/restart arbitrary programs. This allows us to provide user-selectable QoS that determine the percent of time that an application will be running (on processor) versus being persisted. This allows us to manage our data center electrical load and “dance with the grid”, increasing load when there is plenty of renewable energy, decreasing load when needed.

This talk begins with an introduction to the renewable transformation, and the combination of Singularity and checkpoint/restart that enables our QoS model. Then presenting our HPC as a service interface, with particular attention to the QoS model.
Event Type
Exhibitor Forum
TimeTuesday, 15 November 20223:30pm - 4pm CST
LocationD171
Session Formats
Recorded
Registration Categories
TP
XO/EX
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