THE COST OF CONDOR: MEASURING POWER USAGE OF SCIENTIFIC COMPUTATION USING THE DESKTOP FLEET Supervisors: Brian Davis Sam Moskwa Summer Scholar: Monish Parajuli

What is Condor?  High Throughput Computing framework  Used to create a cluster of computers  Powerful and simple way running tasks  Commonly used to perform CPU cycle scavenging Image form

Condor at CSIRO  Installed on 4000 desktops  Peak capacity 13 TFlop/s Imagine doing * trillion times in 1 second  Current usage ~30,000 CPU hours

Purpose Switching off power can reduce up to 10% electricity use Computers need to be left on to run condor

Measure, measure, measure  Hardware  DellCPU (Windows based High Performance Computing cluster)  Optiplex 755 (Old computers with Allendale processors)  Optiplex 7170 (New computers with Ivy bridge processors)  Operations  APSIM (Agricultural simulation program)  CPU Bound (Tasks limited by processor speed)  Memory Bound (Tasks limited by speed of memory)  Disk Intensive (Tasks reading/writing large amounts of data)

What do those figures mean?  It costs about $2500/year to leave computers turned off!!  It costs an extra $4500/year to run condor during work hours  It costs $100,000/year to run condor all the time

But that is not much!!

Another comparison  Burnet  Peak capacity: TFlop/s  Cost : $840,000  Condor  Peak capacity: ~13 TFlop/s  Cost: $0 well not exactly...

So throw away the supercomputers?  No! Condor is not suitable for all types of tasks  Limited by the specification of the desktop computers  Supercomputers are really efficient  Perform more calculation per minute  Consume less energy per task

Then why use condor?  Utilize compute capacity  Compliment the HPC

Future  Look at other HPCs (Burnet, Bragg, Cherax)  Look at tasks other than APSIM  Use the energy usage profile to predict energy cost

Conclusion

 Cost of running condor is negligible compared to the cost of not being able to do science

Thank you! Questions/comments?

Cost while leaving computers turned off = Non-work hours * power while idle * cost of electricity * number of computers * workdays/year =16 hours/day * kW * $0.0817/kWh * 4000 * 365 days/year =$ /year Extra cost to run condor during work hours = Idle hours * cost of electricity * number of computers * power draw while working * workdays/year * utilization % = 2 hours/day * /kWh * 4000 * kW * 365 days/year * 32.46% =$ /year Extra cost to run condor all the time = Non work hours * cost of electricity * number of computers * power draw while working * workdays/year + Extra cost to run condor during work hours = 16 hours/day * $0.0817/kWh * 4000 * ( kW * 32.46% * 67.54% )* 365 days/year + Extra cost to run condor during work hours =$ /year + $ /year =$ /year Calculations