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Comment by VadimPR | Hacker News Reader

How bad is this for the environment?

Seems like it has about 700/5 = 140 GPUs. And they are about 0.4kW each. Let's say it is 50% utilized for a year. That is 140 * 0.4 * 0.5 * 365 * 24 = 245280 kWh.

Let's say electricity generation creates 0.5 kg CO2e per kWh. So 122640 kg CO2e per year.

For comparison, driving a cars creates about 0.2kg CO2 per km. Or 0.32 kg per mile. So about the same as driving 122640 / 0.32 = 383250 miles per year. Call it 38 cars.

Edit: Corrected the above CO2 per km figure to fix a factor of 100 error.

Obviously there are a million things wrong with this analysis. For example, we don't know if they're going to use the machine to do climate modelling that will lead to a headline in the media that causes the green party to be elected ;-)

HPC system utilization is typically upwards of 90%, these things are not idle. There's almost always a queue of jobs waiting to run, at least in my experience.

Definitely, also it makes you hate those who hog up the resources. A good scheduler will take into account the past usage however.

Cars generate closer to 122g of CO2 per km [1]. 122,000kg would be ~1 million km or ~50 cars.

1 - https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/transport/vehicles/cars_...

Damn. I was confused by the fuel consumption being in per 100 km units. I've edited my post. Thanks.

lol - https://old.reddit.com/r/Metric/comments/hytuja/how_does_the...

Yeah who isn't hahaha

It has 140 nodes, each with 8 GPU's. Add in extra infra like storage, networking etc. and you're looking at around 700 kW at 100% utilization.

You're right. The article is wrong. It said:

> A single A100 GPU’s 54 billion transistors can execute 5 petaflops of performance, according to Nvidia.

It is a single system of 8 GPUs that can do 5 petaflops.

I can't edit my post anymore. Multiply my numbers by 8, or a bit more if you want to take into account higher utilization and the other overheads you mention. So ~500 cars. This is my final offer.

FWIW, UF is planning to be carbon neutral by 2025. I don't know how the supercomputer factors into the equation, but I am sure someone has it in mind.

https://sustainable.ufl.edu/campus-initiatives/neutral-uf-co...

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