RZ among the winners of the "Sustainable University" competition

Scientific computing poses enormous challenges for the university in terms of energy efficiency and sustainability. In many areas of research, knowledge is increasingly gained through the use of ever more powerful, yet energy-intensive computers. These constantly growing requirements meet the upcoming energy transition on the one hand and the requirements resulting from the university's sustainability claim on the other hand. This leads to changing framework conditions for the operation of HPC systems and cloud infrastructures. From the social responsibility of research as well as from the pioneering role of the university, necessary steps are derived, which are also to be taken with the three submissions of the RZ.

At the AKNU (Sustainable University Working Group), the prizes of the Energy Efficiency Competition were officially awarded and all six applications from the competition were briefly presented (see also message on the intranet). The RZ was represented with three projects and jointly received a second prize of the competition for the projects "Energy Saving in High Performance Computing" and "Efficient Operation of Large Cloud Infrastructures at the RZ". There was also a submission on waste heat utilization. We now want to use the prize money to exchange ideas on the various optimization possibilities in joint workshops, hackathons, social lunches, to disseminate best practices and to develop new ideas on how future, energy-sensitive operation of large IT infrastructures for science could look. At the same time, the existing options for displaying consumption, workloads and feedback will be developed step by step.