Public Funding for Allinea Software Limited

The UK has world leading technology for monitoring high performance computing (HPC) systems and for compiling programs for energy efficiency. This project brings these technologies together to provide an end-to-end system to significantly reduce the energy used by such systems, using the STFC's HPC facilities to demonstrate its effectiveness. Advancing such technology carries risks, but made possible through Innovate UK support. As well as HPC, the technology is applicable to the much larger data centre market, the annual electricity bill for which is $7.6Bn in the US alone. This project has the potential to reduce that by 20%. This will yield commercial benefits to the industrial participants, all small, export based UK companies addressing this global market as well as to the wider UK economy. It will also have major environmental benefits, by reducing CO2 emissions.

Inefficient software is a major cause of excessive energy consumption in large scientific computer systems. Energy efficiency is not easily considered during the development of software for high-performance computing (HPC), and yet the energy usage of HPC architectures exceeds 1MW on many state-of-the-art systems and is therefore economically and environmentally expensive; the cost of 1MW power is close to £1M per annum. This project will develop and demonstrate world-leading capabilities in software tools for energy and performance modelling in large scale multi- and many- core computing. The lead participant provides world-leading software development tools for high performance computing, and will work together with one of the UK academic sector’s most respected software performance modelling groups, to address the challenges of enabling software developers to more closely understand and improve the energy properties of their applications.