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Minisymposium Presentation
The Energy Efficiency and Carbon Footprint of ICON Climate Model Simulations at CSCS
Presenter
William Sawyer is a senior computational scientist at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), in Lugano, Switzerland, an autonomous branch of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH). He works in the Office of the Chief Technical Officer as a liaison between CSCS's customers – researchers from a variety of scientific disciplines, in particular from in Geosciences – and the system engineers and computer scientists who support current and emerging high performance computing solutions. He has more than 20 years of experience in numerical analysis for HPC, and has been active in research at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Maryland, as well as CSCS.
Description
In an environmental impact case study of computing at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) we consider the energy consumption of climate simulations currently planned on the new CSCS "Alps" computing platform. We use the Icosahedral Non-hydrostatic (ICON) model, which has been extensively refactored within the https://c2sm.ethz.ch/research/exclaim.html project to improve its performance on already highly energy-efficient Nvidia Hopper Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). ICON simulations will use a substantial fraction of the overall Alps resources when it comes fully online. We briefly present these optimization efforts as well as our latest ICON benchmarks, and then extrapolate to the overall energy consumption needed for scientific use cases planned within the EXCLAIM project. The energy projections for these runs are crucial to budget for electricity, but accounting for the carbon footprint is also part of our societal obligation. As part of an ongoing carbon footprint study, we outline the energy efficiency of the CSCS infrastructure -- its power usage effectiveness and the power efficiency of the computing platform -- and quantify the CO2-equivalent emissions for these simulations. We leave it to the audience to decide if we are living up to our environmental obligations while still promoting this important research area.