The ICARUS white paper. A scalable energy-efficient, solar-powered HPC center based on low power GPUs

Abstract

We present a unique approach for integrating research in High Performance Computing (HPC) as well as photovoltaic (PV) solar farming and battery technologies into a container-based compute center designed for a maximum of energy efficiency, performance and extensibility/scalability. We use NVIDIA Jetson TK1 boards to build a considerably dimensioned cluster of 60 low-power GPUs, attach a 7:5 kWp solar farm and a 8 kWh Lithium-Ion battery power supply and integrate everything into a single-container, standalone housing. We demonstrate the success of our system by evaluating the performance and energy efficiency for common versatile dense and sparse linear algebra kernels as well as a full CFD code. By this work we can show, that with current technology, energy consumption-induced follow-up cost of HPC can be reduced to zero.