Energy Consumption of MD Calculations on Hybrid and CPU-Only Supercomputers with Air and Immersion Cooling

Abstract

The article presents the energy consumption and efficiency analysis based on the data from three small-size supercomputers installed in JIHT RAS. One system is the air-cooled hybrid supercomputer Desmos with AMD FirePro GPUs and two others are the air-cooled and liquid-cooled segments of the supercomputer Fisher based on AMD Epyc Naples CPUs. To collect data, we implement the same real-time analytics infrastructure on all three supercomputers. We consider classical molecular-dynamics problem as a benchmarking tool. Our results quantify the energy savings that are provided by the GPU-based calculations in comparison with CPU-only calculations and by liquid cooling in comparison with air-cooling. During strong scaling benchmarks, we detect an interesting minimum of energy consumption in the CPU-only case.