Collaborative Research: II-NEW: Marcher - A Heterogeneous High Performance Computing Infrastructure for Research and Education in Green Computing

在设计和部署下一代超级计算机时，能源消耗过高是一个主要制约因素。要最大限度地减少高性能计算的能耗，需要在体系结构、系统支持和应用程序的多个层面上采用新的节能技术。阻碍这些新技术探索的一个障碍是缺乏能够为技术评估和验证提供准确、细粒度和实时功率和能量测量的工具和系统。该项目通过构建Marcher弥合了这一差距，Marcher是一种异类高性能计算基础设施，配备了尖端的高能效加速器，包括英特尔许多集成内核和NVIDIA图形处理单元、节能内存系统、硬盘驱动器和固态硬盘的混合存储以及高性能互连。Marcher系统支持为主要计算机组件开发两个互补的组件级功率测量工具：(I)可插拔功率数据采集卡(PODAC)，用于直接和分解功率测量；(Ii)软件功率表(SoftMeter)，用于间接估计直接测量不可行或成本太高的系统的功耗。该项目完成后，PODAC和SoftMeter都将提供给更广泛的社区和研究人员，以建立他们自己的电力感知系统。Marcher将向外部研究小组开放，为用户提供全面和详细的性能和电源配置文件，以帮助研究节能软件设计和系统开发。

Excessive energy consumption is a major constraint when designing and deploying the next generation of supercomputers. Minimizing energy consumption of high performance computing requires novel energy-conscious technologies at multiple layers from architecture, system support, and applications. One obstacle that hinders the exploration of these new technologies is the lack of tools and systems that can provide accurate, fine-grained, and real-time power and energy measurement for technology evaluation and verification. This project bridges the gap by building Marcher, a heterogeneous high performance computing infrastructure equipped with cutting-edge power-efficient accelerators including Intel Many Integrated Cores and Nvidia Graphics Processing Units, power-aware memory systems, hybrid storage with hard disk drives and solid state disks, and high performance interconnects. The Marcher system supports the development of two complementary component-level power measurement tools for major computer components: (i) pluggable Power Data Acquisition Card (PODAC) for direct and decomposed power measurement and (ii) Software Power Meter (SoftMeter) that indirectly estimates the power consumption of systems where direct measurement is not feasible or too costly. Upon completion of this project, both PODAC and SoftMeter will be made available to a broader community and researchers to establish their own power-aware systems. Marcher will be open to external research groups and provide users with comprehensive and detailed performance and power profiles to aid the research in energy efficient software design and system development.