Communications of the ACM
For Energy-Efficient Hpc, Less Is More
Credit: HPCwire
Intel researchers recently demonstrated their Near-Threshold Voltage (NTV) technology by operating an x86 microprocessor on just two milliwatts of power.
The threshold voltage is the amount required to generate a minimum of current across a transistor. Intel researchers have found that the most efficient use of energy is to operate a circuit near that of its threshold voltage, although doing so is problematic. For example, although all transistors should perform to the same level, there can be billions of transistors on a given chip and some will perform worse than others, resulting in significant power loss. Another issue is that NTV decreases frequency substantially.
As a result, although NTV would be impractical for general-purpose central processing units, high-performance computing's massively parallel computing environment could benefit from NTV technology. "Based on our analysis of these papers, [NTV] computing techniques are most applicable to highly parallel workloads," says Real World Technologies researcher David Kanter.
From HPC Wire
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