Magellan Final Report - Office of Science - U.S. Department of Energy

Magellan Final Report
Finding 8. DOE supercomputing centers already approach energy efficiency levels achieved in
commercial cloud centers.
Cloud environments achieve energy efficiency through consolidation of resources and optimized facilities.
Commercial cloud data providers emphasize the efficient use of power in their data centers. DOE HPC
centers already achieve high levels of consolidation and energy efficiency. For example, DOE centers often
operate at utilization levels over 85% and have a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating in the range of 1.2
to 1.5.
Finding 9. Cloud is a business model and can be applied at DOE supercomputing centers.
Cloud has been used to refer to a number of things in the last few years. The National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST) definition of cloud computing describes it as a model for enabling convenient,
on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage,
applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort
or service provider interaction [63]. Cloud computing introduces a new business model and additional new
technologies and features. Users with applications that have more dynamic or interactive needs could benefit
from on-demand, self-service environments and rapid elasticity through the use of virtualization technology,
and the MapReduce programming model to manage loosely coupled application runs. Scientific environments
at high performance computing (HPC) centers today provide a number of these key features, including resource
pooling, broad network access, and measured services based on user allocations. Rapid elasticity and
on-demand self-service environments essentially require different resource allocation and scheduling policies
that could also be provided through current HPC centers, albeit with an impact on resource utilization.
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