 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of ISC, High Performance 2023, where we're covering all things HPC, machine learning, AI, high performance analytics, and quantum computing. And one of the most important topics in the HPC community is sustainability. And in this segment, we're going to try to more deeply understand how organizations can achieve sustainability through green energy and renewable sources. And so with me to do that are Matt Foley from AMD, Jebon, Zernabon from Dell Technologies, and Guy Dowers from At North. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Jebon, big picture. If you think about all infrastructure power, how much of that actually is consumed by data centers? And then how much of that is HPC? Well, first of all, Dave, let's put it into a context. You know, if you are looking about how much is the overall consumption of data centers, you will see that from the entire worldwide figure, you'll get into one 1.5%. Which you might say, well, doesn't look like big, but in reality is enormous, is very, very large. So based on several assessments done by Hyperion Research, you will see that, for instance, the on-prem HPC represents approximately a fifth or fourth of the overall server implementation, especially here into EMEA. So this you can get into what? Because the consumption or the servers into an HP system, usually the compute, the nodes, are very, very hungry in terms of power consumption. You might say that we are getting into probably 0.5%, 0.7% of consumption. This is not at all easy to maintain. It's really important to understand how to build it and how to drive it, because it represents an immense amount of power which in these days comes with also a very large cost. If you think about the past, we used to say half of the price was for the acquisition of the hardware part and the other half of the cost of running an HPC represents the power. I think these days it started to be slightly different. Is the mix shifting? I mean, it sounds like it is. It sounds like the HPC and of course, all this AI talk over the last couple of months, is it consuming, is HPC now consuming a larger and larger portion of that pie or is it more sort of a steady state? I wonder, Shurban, maybe Giu, you have some thoughts on this? Well, we are in an IT world. So the usual answer to start with is, it depends. It depends what you understand by HPC, and what activity which support discovery, creative process, generative AI, everything right now. It really depends on how you understand that HPC is used outside of the data center. And then for instance, you have products like FPGA, which are used in cameras or Edge, more and more getting into production. So HPC usage is growing. So as well as this is what's happening as well with the power consumption associated. Yeah, so I should have shared with the audience. Shurban works with a lot of Dell customers, making sure that they're getting the most out of their infrastructure. Now, Matt, you're with AMD, so you guys are down deep into the semiconductor land. Talk about your role and your area of expertise. Well, certainly, yes. I manage the field application engineers for AMD across Europe, Middle East and Africa for the commercial business. And HPC and adaptive computing is really what we are about at AMD. And it's one of those things that we as a company have focused on because it provides a lot of market insight. And so the advances that we make in order to compete successfully in the HPC market, we can then take those and use those across the piece as Shurban was mentioning before about how HPC is infiltrating all sorts of other different areas outside of the data center. And then beyond that, what we see as well is that aside from just the usual efficiency moves where you take a better process or use better packaging technology, what we really see here is a need for heterogeneous computing where we're actually gonna start taking the problems and decomposing them into different ways that acceleration can better solve them. And by doing that, we believe we can achieve step-function improvements in terms of efficiency and sustainability instead of mere percentages. And we really look forward to working with all of our partners to package that up and to provide that to the market. Yeah, that's exciting. I mean, in order to magnitude improvement would be huge. Guy, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about at North and your background is multi-dimensional. You've worked for many, many firms and have a lot of expertise in this space. Yeah, so North is a pan-Nordic data center and HPC and AI provider. So we are basing everything based on our very sustainable data centers, place to where we can find the highest degree of renewable energy and we build the whole stack. So we built it with all of us here together and we have very large enterprises from all over the world bringing their workloads. First they bring them from on premise when their data centers are no longer up to date for running HPC or AI or very accelerated computing. So they bring it over to ours who are entirely built for this purpose. Or we have more and more customers who migrate away from the public cloud because they have experience that it's actually very good for general purpose computing and occasional usage. But for HPC, which tend to be used on a constant base and optimized in the 24 by seven it becomes way too expensive. So they come to us for cost reason for total cost of ownership reason, but most and actually foremost for the sustainability reason. Thank you for that. Okay, so maybe Sherbaughn you could answer this for me. So my understanding is in the near term we're going to get to about 125 kilowatts of power in a single HPC rack. And I was trying to figure out, okay, is that a lot? It sounds like a lot, but so it's like for a single day's usage is probably in kilowatt hours it's at least five to six times the average US household are probably more like 10 X because most of the time you're sleeping. So is this a concern? Well, let's put it in a different format. I think that 125 kilowatts per rack is already possible today. Actually 200 kilowatts is very likely to be possible in tomorrow, but high density power was always a concern. And beside of the energy cost, then you have safety, then you have cooling challenging and these are only contributed to this one. Nevertheless, there is a result of these days semiconductor development and like any vendor research, we will need to cope with these challenges now and in the future. We do foresee changes in the environment, including the rack design, including cooling methods, including power distribution. But the energy issue and the computational efficiency is not power per box or per racks. I think we should go further into this one and understand exactly when we are discussing is the overall power footprint that an expert system like that is using? Yeah, I think from our perspective here, we certainly see the more dense you make the power, the more efficient the system is. So that 125 kilowatt rack is a very efficient rack, but it's a physical challenge to power and cool that, to get as much power there as you need and to get as much cooling there as you need. And that's why we are constantly asked about liquid cooling, immersion cooling, does air still have a future? And what I see is that all of the above are still very relevant and still definitely in play. And I never count out the engineers behind all of those technologies because there are significant breakthroughs when it comes to those cooling and power discussions. And also there's other regulatory discussions as well that are had with the areas that host these data centers. Yeah, so there's no silver bullet, as you say, it's all of the above in a combination. So what is the scale of this sustainability issue? I mean, obviously the economics are important. People want to maintain or, ideally they'd love to lower the power bill, but that's like not likely, but you want to at least maintain it as a percentage of your overall spend or maybe even compress it. But why should HPC be so worried about this, Matt? Maybe you've got some thoughts on that. So I think from our perspective, we need to make these tools as great as these tools are, they're only as good as they are accessible. And so currently we can do an exoflop in 20 megawatts. So that's what the exoflop system at Oak Ridge National Laboratories does. And so with regards to that, if you expand that, if you continue that trajectory, it quickly becomes unsustainable. You're looking at half of a nuclear power plan in order to get to a zeta-scale system. And so going beyond this and continuing on that present course in speed is simply unsustainable, which is why, again for us, what we really need to do is figure out how to redo these problems. You can argue we've spent the last 20 or 30 years moving all applications to one architecture and then riding that semiconductor curve down. Whereas in the future, we're going to have to reconsider the actual computer science, the actual problem set there and take the problem apart in a way that it can actually be accelerated meaningfully. So, okay, thank you. So Guy, my understanding then is 125 kilowatts per rack is a good thing, but you got to cool it, right? So what is the sort of state of the art? How are people trying to reduce their power consumption, using waste power? Is that something that's common? How are organizations approaching this and what's the impact? Well, what we hear from our clients and especially from our enterprise clients, they want to see the total TCO and that's still quite predominant. And what is then the system ability impact of all this? So does it make sense for their business? So that's why they look at the whole combination. Is it in the right location? So actually they don't need to cool so much. Secondly, the data center design, the cooling design, how is the power being distributed? It has already been set here, but the whole stack comes together, meaning every element of the technology comes together and that's then the whole equation that determines is this done at a good TCO at the total cost of ownership that makes sense for the business? And yes, technology-wise, it's absolutely possible to run more than 125 a rack. But what we then see in, let's say, European data centers all over the place is that they leave the rest of the data center empty to be able to just convey and cool that one rack. That doesn't make any sense, right? So we want to do this really with an optimized data center, fully occupied, balanced power, balanced cooling and manageability of all this. Because then the technology equation also goes up. All the technology you need to add comes to the cost of your PUE. If you add redundancy, if you add complexity and so on, it comes home with a cost and that needs to be paid at the end. So that's why it needs to make sense. That's what we hear from our clients. And we have clients who say, yes, we want to prove the future. That is possible. We want to really make a stake in the ground to show it off and that's a very good reason to go beyond. But if it just to be economical and to be sustainable, we look for more like an average design that makes sense for that TCO. Not just for the sake of the most dense and the most technology-wise. But that also makes sense for example, for supercomputing centers, when you want to show that off. So I get that, I mean, you got to look at the whole picture, the whole house if you will. But I still got to ask Matt, you may or may not know. So I should have asked you before. What does quantum do? Does quantum, is it more power consumptive? Do we know yet? Is it less power consumptive? Would know. Wouldn't know about. So, all right, to be continued there. Yeah, does anybody know? Well, we are comparing different technologies and I don't think it's correct. What quantum it will be at the end of the day is a different accelerator or a different way to use acceleration in place, right? So it's definitely not the GPU for that reason. But it will definitely help the industry to develop for it. At least, you know, put it like that, HPC drives innovation to progress the humankind in industry like healthcare, manufacturing, life science, whatever, you know? And sustainability, including this one, it will be a very important one to take forward. Yeah, there's a lot more social good. Go ahead, Matt, see. To some extent, the answer's going to come from HPC because a lot of the applications that we get asked to benchmark and to understand how well they work on HPC systems are actually the quantum simulators. So those are the ones that are actually modeling and trying to figure out and understand and hopefully answer the question you asked with regards to power efficiency, sustainability and really overall usefulness of the technology. Interesting, quantum and AI I'll solve for quantum and AI. Guy, I think it's probably appropriate for this question. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most data centers today are probably powered by coal, is that correct? And so how do you design a data center differently if the power is green? Is there a different way to think about it? Well, then location is the first element to it. Can you get renewable energy to a 100% or to a very high degree? And in some areas it is, or it's very fluctuating or it just like a very low percentage. And that is, that's happened to be much easier for us. That's why we are focusing so much on first of all HPC and AI, but also on the location being in the Nordics where actually a lot of, yeah, in all the countries we can get close to 100% or 100% renewable energy. So location is the first part. And then the designs of the data center entirely built for HPC and AI and for high density workloads does the second part from a power point of view, especially from a cooling point of view. And yeah, we use more and more heat recovery and reuse the wasted heat and sell it again into the municipalities. And that's happened also to be well developed in the Nordic countries and not yet or not in many parts in the rest of the world. Thank you. Shurban, is the quest for a PUE of one, is that still a holy grail milestone if all the power is renewable? Well, we heard the earlier saying that locality is one of the important things to consider. There were times where we built data center because the land was cheap. Now we are looking to understand if the workloads we are running are running into the correct data center. And here we've a lot of concerns related to security and things like that. PUE is a power usage efficiency, right? Is an indicator of how the system is running, right? But probably on a short term, we should look as well on the carbon footprint and not only from a price performance per watt, but also into what does it mean in terms of the carbon which we are releasing. So I think into this one, definitely we must drive for greater efficiency and sustainability is part of how you are designing your solution in order to have a system able to perform on your needs. So I don't think that PUE alone is the only one. I think that the answer is that we'll need to look constantly at new indicators related to how a system is used. Got it, makes sense. Go ahead. Just going to chime in about the efficiency part, right? In terms of if we don't strive for continued efficiency, continued lowering of the PUE, we're wasting really, even if it's all renewable, we're wasting the renewable energy that could go to other uses in society. And so I think it's extremely important to make sure that we are as efficient as we can be that we're good stewards of the resources that we have because renewable energy isn't as yet enough to power the entire world. So the more of it that we can use efficiently and the more that it can be shared across the other areas of the economy and of society, I think the better. Gotcha. Guy, is it better to move data centers to locations where energy is green or maybe you can use outside air and where the temperatures are cold up in Iceland or wherever, what are your thoughts on that? Well, the success we see now and the demand we see is that people are getting it. Of course, this is not new. We're doing it since 10, 15 years that we start to build out first in Iceland and attracted workloads from literally first all of Europe, but now a lot of US companies and workloads being run out of Asia. So everything that is, I would say, everything that's not latency dependent and HPC usually is not or machine learning is not. You can run it wherever in the world. So you run it at the best place where actually the PUE is low, but then the other aspect of the PUE that is also that why not always you need full redundancy, not always need tier three or very high tier data centers where there is a lot of redundancy where everything is fully, fully redundant. So that's also part of energy being used for that redundancy and that efficiency. If not needed, why over design it? So that is the other aspect, but location is definitely the first one. There is so many data centers that are just used because people are used to have it nearby and want to see the lights flashing, but it's not really needed. It's not, yeah, there is no technical or economical reason to keep it running in very inefficient places. And that's what we see now. We see really global companies moving at mass away from inefficient locations or from general public cloud because they see also that general public cloud are running Europe in the flag count is mainly which are pre-definition made also for general compute and not optimized for these PCs who actually not fully efficient. So that is the other equation that we see that people are really moving very, very large workloads. So we have now of course, well, for example, BMP Paribas has done that since five years that they bring over their heaviest calculations first in Iceland, then in Sweden and literally all of it is now brought over and they have just saved more than 50% of the carbon footprint. So, yeah, that's the proof of it. The very large corporations are doing it. So which puts some, sorry to cut you, it's put some back in perspective what we start the conversation from. It's the architecture is the design and not the last is the reliability of the system is exactly what Guy was mentioning earlier related to why you need to double and to make it super redundant when you can if the system is reliable, you can use it better than in this perspective. And that saves a lot about economics and power. Matt, what are the big sources of sustainable energy that are being used to power HPC today and how will that change in the future? I think it's really locational, right? In terms of if you're near a lot of water you can use water if you're in a sunny location sort of in the Middle East, for example, solar comes into play, geothermal certainly the case in Iceland and I think it really depends on the environmental characteristics and how the, where the renewable energy where the renewable energy sources come from. I mean, once you get the renewable energy and also figure out a way to store it then for that from that perspective and that point on it's basically just energy. And so then it can go into the data center and power the workloads but we need to have a broad portfolio of renewable energy sources because of the, because they're all different in terms of the different areas of the world have strengths and some and weaknesses and others. And so we need to be, I think the answer really isn't as much of a direct answer as you were looking for but the answer really is that it is situationally dependent on really what's available. Kind of another, it depends question. What's the right model for, from a sustainability standpoint? Should I run my workloads in the cloud or should I run them on trem? Guy, do you have any thoughts on this? Well, we just published the white paper which is based on a lot of customer feedback. So yeah, please find it out on our website and it's fresh. So in that is when you have occasional use which sometimes is an HPC very important. You have no idea how much you need to use. You have no idea for how long. Well, that then the cloud model is perfect to try it out. Once you have a lot of use which a lot of HPC centers have, they have 24 by seven. It's 99 that it's 100% use. That's absolutely not where the cloud is made from. So then you do it or you do it on premise when you have it at the right location at the right full stack sustainability and efficiency. But then the model is really the most efficient model is that you have a baseline capacity for catering your day-to-day needs so that you have the best return on investment or all your engineers time but also on your software licenses. So you really have the most efficient system at the best TCO available for your baseline. And on top of that, you scale up and you scale down. But what we offer is to do that on the same location. So your data gravity that you don't, yeah, because we talk here about machine learning or we talk about big simulations where the data pack is also huge. So if you then need to send this from an on-prem to a public cloud that cost of egress ingress is total waste. And that's also sustainability that is lost because you just send it for sending data back and forward. So actually what we do is a combination of both of both worlds, the best of both worlds is that we cater for a very solid baseline, very efficient and there we grow the cluster and we shrink it back. So that is actually the best of both worlds without the data gravity in the middle. Yeah, you're seeing the whole cloud operating model move to on-prem. I mean, it's obvious that that's happening. This has been a great power panel pun intended but Gerbond, I'll give you the last word. Give us the summary and bring us home. Look, it's first of all, it was a joy to have my colleagues here together with us. I sincerely believe that what we are putting on sustainability drives forward into on how every one of our customers is going to run the business. Back to the previous idea, you can build it on-prem. You can consume it as a service, either on-demand, HPC on-demand as a collocation or as a service via Apex. And everything which we are trying to put together in front of our customers is to make their journey much more predictable, much more easy to be understood from a results point of view. I think that the future is really bright and when I'm looking to what we can put together by the industry into this segment is incredibly promising. Excellent, gentlemen, thanks so much. It was great to have you on the program to learn about this really important issue. All right, keep it right there for more coverage of ISC 2023 and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage.