Revealing power, energy and thermal dynamics of a 200PF pre-exascale supercomputer

Abstract

As we approach the exascale computing era, the focused understanding of power consumption and its overall constraint on HPC architectures and applications are becoming increasingly paramount. Summit, located at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), is one of the fastest and largest pre-exascale platforms in operation today. This paper provides a first-order examination and analysis of power consumption at the component-level, node-level, and system-level, from all 4,626 Summit compute nodes, each with over 100 metrics at 1Hz frequency over the entire year of 2020. We also investigate the power characteristics and energy efficiency of over 840k Summit jobs and 250k GPU failure logs for further operational insights. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic analysis of power data of HPC system at this scale.