Energy-efficient I/O for supercomputing

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Supercomputing infrastructure has reached an industrial scale. The video, search, and cloud computing services upon which our modern economy relies are delivered from warehouse-sized facilities housing thousands of individual servers. The energy consumption of these facilities is enormous, both in economic and environmental terms. Unfortunately, energy-efficiency has not been a primary concern in the design of these distributed supercomputers. Consequently, they operate at 15-65% of their peak energy efficiency most of the time. This project will improve the energy-efficiency of distributed supercomputing environments by targeting the interconnections within them. Without progress on the digital input/output (I/O) circuits at either end of these interconnects, their share of overall server power will increase to over 50% in the next decade. We will develop I/O integrated circuits and subsystems that are capable of near-zero energy consumption when idle, sub-nanosecond wakeup times, and scalable to meet the demands of the future. The massive industrial scale of parallel supercomputing infrastructure makes the impact of this research dramatic, both economically and environmentally. Consider the central processor in a single high-end compute server, which by 2020 will demand an aggregate I/O bandwidth of 1TB/s. Using today's technology, the I/O alone will consume roughly $800 in electricity over the computer's 5-year lifetime. This research project can offer a $750 energy savings from a single computer - more than the total CPU cost. For the environmentally minded, this represents a savings of 7500 kg in CO2 emissions. With thousands of such servers in each data center, the worldwide numbers are staggering. The total energy per year consumed by compute servers is 220 TWh, roughly 10% of which is attributable to I/O. Hence, even research that improves I/O energy efficiency by only 1% in these installations yields a savings equivalent to the average electricity consumption of 20,000 homes. Our research promises improvements far exceeding 1%.