Towards Energy Efficient Computing Based on the Estimation of Energy Consumption

The amount of computation power in the world keeps increasing as well as the computation needs by the industry and society. That increases also the total energy consumption on ICT, which reached the level of billions of dollars spent every year, as well as an equivalent emission print of millions of tons of CO $$_2$$ 2 per year. That economical and ecological costs motivate us to search for more efficient computation. In addition, one more need for an efficient computer is the target of exascale computing and higher levels after that. We consider that it is needed a shift from considering only computation time when optimizing code, to also consider more efficient use of energy. To achieve energy-efficient computing, we consider that the first step considers recording the energy consumption of the algorithms used, and then using those results to select a more efficient energy algorithm among those available, which may require to increase the parallelization level and/or computation time, while still fulfill with the application requirements. Notice that cooling systems in the HPC may require to consume the same amount of energy as that consumed in the computing nodes, which means that the reduction of energy consumption due to efficient energy programming will also be doubled.