Performance estimation of high performance computing systems with Energy Efficient Ethernet technology

• DOI: 10.1007/s00450-013-0238-4
• Publication Date: 2013-07-24T18:02:54Z
• Authors: Shinobu Miwa; Sho Aita; Hiroshi Nakamura
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology; 7. Clean energy; Computer Science(all)

Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) is an Ethernet standard for lowering power consumption in commodity network devices. When the load of a link is low, EEE allows the link to turn into a low power mode and therefore can significantly save the power consumption of a network device. EEE is expected to be adopted in high performance computing (HPC) systems a few years later, but the performance impact caused by EEE-enabled in HPC systems is still unknown. To encourage HPC system developers to adopt the EEE technology, it is required for the performance estimation of the non-existing HPC systems that would utilize the EEE technology. This paper presents the performance estimation method for EEE-supported HPC systems, which utilizes a novel performance model we propose. The model with a few profiles for HPC applications allows us to anticipate the performance of the systems not yet realized. The evaluation results show that the proposed model has the significant accuracy and that EEE is still promising for HPC applications.