Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A national HPC service publishes annual PUE and grid carbon intensity alongside its allocations.
- Is an instance
A research consortium prefers a warm-water-cooled cluster with heat re-use over a slightly faster air-cooled alternative.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Marketing a cluster as green based solely on its placement next to a wind farm without efficiency commitments is not sustainable HPC.
- Not an instance
A traditional 1990s air-cooled machine room with no measurement is the opposite.
Editorial commentary
Sustainable HPC covers data-centre design (free cooling, warm-water cooling loops, heat re-use into district heating), workload-aware scheduling (carbon-aware queues, low-utilisation node shutdown), hardware refresh policies that extend useful life, and accelerator selection based on FLOPs per watt. Major centres (LUMI in Finland, Adastra in France) heat municipal buildings with waste heat as a flagship example. Sustainable HPC also addresses scope-3 embodied emissions, often the largest single component of a cluster's life-cycle carbon.
References
- Green500 list methodology; EuroHPC Joint Undertaking sustainability charter.
Also known as
Green HPC · Sustainable supercomputing
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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