Welcome to the home of the Supercomputing in Small Spaces (SSS) project. Wu Feng, along with Michael S. Warren and Eric H. Weigle, started this project back in September 2001 with a 24-node Bladed Beowulf cluster dubbed MetaBlade, which consumed only 400 watts of power and occupied five square feet of space. By April 2002, the SSS project unveiled its 240-node "Green Destiny" cluster, which consumed as little as 3.2 kilowatts (i.e., two hairdryers) while still occupying only five square feet of space and delivering over 100 Gflops on the LINPACK benchmark, which would have placed it at #393 on the TOP500 List at the time.
Since 2002, the SSS project has evolved in two different directions: (1) a low-power, architectural approach and (2) a power-aware, software-based approach. Early on, the architectural approach was adopted by a start-up company in Silicon Valley and transformed into a low-power, cluster workstation. In the meantime, our software-based approach leveraged dynamic frequency and voltage scaling (DVFS) on commodity high-performance computing (HPC) microprocessors, such as the AMD Opteron, to reduce CPU power consumption by as much as 70% with nearly negligible impact on performance. The software-based approach is based on our innovative β algorithm, which has been commercialized as EnergyFit.
Wu-chun Feng is the Principal Investigator of the project and can be reached at "feng (at) cs (dot) vt (dot) edu."
Last updated: Feb 23, 2014