Computers and the Energy factor

Jülich researchers are working on energyefficient solutions on different levels: from tiny components to computer architectures and the energy management in supercomputer centres. Scientists headed by Professor Rainer Waser from the Peter Grünberg Institute at Jülich are developing memristors – tiny electronic components whose resistance can be switched from high to low using ultra-short voltage pulses. The energy required to write to these new memories is less than a thousandth of that required by today’s flash memories, used for example in USB flash drives. Waser is convinced that memristors could compete with resistors in the future. One of their advantages lies in the fact that they combine the working memory and the actual processing unit, which are normally physically separated. Transferring data between these two components requires an enormous amount of energy, which could be saved. Scientists at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) are collaborating with companies such as IBM and Intel with the aim of producing computers by 2020 that are a thousand times faster than today’s supercomputers but do not use any more energy. “This means that we must increase energy efficiency a thousand times over, for example, by improving access to working memory and mass storage as well as input and output units,” says Dr. Thomas Fieseler, head of technology at JSC. Jülich supercomputer experts already tested parts of such an IBM energy-efficient computer architecture in 2011. In the “Fit4Green” project, researchers then developed software that allows them to perform different tasks, or “jobs”, on a supercomputer in a way that requires between 6 and 16 percent less energy.

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