Green Supercomputing Comes of Age

Energy-efficient (green) supercomputing has traditionally been viewed as passé, even to the point of public ridicule. But today, it's finally coming into vogue. This paper describes the authors' view of this evolution. Although HEC might elicit an image of a gar-gantuan supercomputer that occupies a huge amount of space and consumes an outrageous amount of power to solve large-scale scientific and engineering problems, it is clearly important to the business and enterprise community. But rather than referring to an HEC resource as being a supercomputer, the business and enterprise communities refer to HEC in general as large-scale data center computing; in this paper, the authors refer to supercomputing as HEC, large-scale data center computing, or both.