Energy Efficient System Management Software

Leibniz Supercomputing Centre operates modern infrastructure management software to measure losses in the electrical infrastructure components such as transformers, uninterruptible power supply units, and power distribution bars. All energy consumption in building automation is monitored along with environmental parameters, such as wet bulb temperature, relative humidity, etc., and stored in a database. This allows the correlation of the energy consumed in the building infrastructure with the cooling needs of IT components in order to gradually optimize all control parameters in the cooling infrastructure. This automatically yields improvements in the energy consumption of the building infrastructure.

Advances in processor performance has led to the point where the full potential of modern server systems is typically not needed. By running multiple virtual server instances on top of the physical hardware, resources can be used more efficiently while remaining flexible for growing future load requirements. Virtualization of server, storage, and networking resources is one of the building blocks in LRZ’s operations.

For the energy efficient operation of supercomputers, a system software environment which exploits the energy saving features of the underlying hardware is required. This implies coordinating the energy saving features of hardware and operating systems across many nodes and cores. Therefore, LRZ and IBM jointly developed a new system management software to explicitly make use of the new features on high performance computing systems.