The First Workshop on Energy Aware High Performance Computing (EnA-HPC) is the successor of the EnA-HPC conference series which brings together researchers, vendors, and HPC center administrators since 2010. Its purpose is to foster discussions regarding the status and future of energy awareness in high performance computing. Fields of interest cover all layers, from the lowest level of hardware technology, via operating system, compiler and application issues to facility technologies like air conditioning, sensor technology and heat reuse. After five successful conferences—2010 to 2012 in Hamburg, 2013 and 2014 in Dresden—EnA-HPC has continued 2016 in Frankfurt as a Workshop at ISC High Performance. This special issue includes selected articles that have been submitted since the last event.

A comprehensive effort at many levels is necessary to yield the overall energy reduction required to enable Exaflop computers that stay within an acceptable power limit. Todays fastest supercomputer—Sunway TaihuLight installed at the National Supercomputing Center in the city of Wuxi, China—achieves a peak performance of 93 Petaflops in the Linpack benchmark.

Although, we are more than one order of magnitude away from our performance goal, todays technology already uses almost the entire acceptable power. TaihuLight’s power input is with 15.3 MW less compared to its predecessor at the first place of Top500 list Tianhe-2. It consumed about 17.8 MW to achieve 33.86 Petaflops.

This development underlines that energy efficiency has become an important aspect for HPC in recent years. Another example is reflected by the Green500 list that ranks HPC systems by their energy efficiency instead of their Linpack performance. Despite the continuous improvement in performance per watt, it is still a long way to go until Exaflop systems become feasible. This situation calls for an intensified research and more interdisciplinary collaboration in the field of Green IT. EnA-HPC will continue to foster this development.

The organizers express their gratitude to all contributors to this journal. Their research efforts will render High Performance Computing economically and ecologically sustainable. We thank the program committee members as well as all reviewers for their efforts in selecting an attractive content for this journal.

Frankfurt, June 2016

Pablo Reble, Thomas Ludwig, Matthias S. Müller, Wolfgang E. Nagel, Vincent Heuveline

Program Committee Members:

  • Trevor E. Carlson, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

  • Marco Guazzone, Universita del Piemonte Orientale, Alessandria, Italy

  • Simon McIntosh-Smith, University of Bristol, United Kingdom

  • Cosimo Anglano, Universita del Piemonte Orientale, Alessandria, Italy

  • Francisco Javier García Blas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

  • Angelos Bilas, FORTH-ICS and University of Crete, Greece

  • Jean-Marc Pierson, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, Toulouse, France

  • Dimitris Nikolopoulos, Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom

  • Natalie Bates, Energy Efficient HPC Working Group, USA

  • Jeyan Thiyagalingam, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

  • Julita Corbalan, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

  • Enrique S. Quintana-Orti, Jaume I University, Castellón de la Plana, Spain

  • Anne Benoit, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon - LIP, Lyon, France

  • Rafael Mayo Gual, Jaume I University, Castellón de la Plana, Spain