Minisymposium Presentation

In recent years the hpc community has increased its efforts in sustainability. But cutting edge performance requires ever increasing resources, above all electrical power, but also semiconductors, raw materials, cooling fluids, land and obviously money to buy all of these. Increases in the supply do of compute do not seem to affect demand much. For all sustainability efforts this means that whatever relative efficiency gains can be implemented, they do not translate to an absolute reduction in ecological footprint. The largest target of sustainability efforts cannot be attacked directly, lest at the cost of performance. The demand for performance is an externality which is partially imposed by society, by science and by politics. But it also partially reflects the narratives of the hpc world. The aim of our talk is two fold. Firstly we will show how relative and absolute sustainability efforts of HLRS have developed historically. Secondly we will discuss how we, as a hpc center, have positioned us with respect to the dilemma of ever increasing absolute resource consumption. We close by asking if there is any prospect for changing the current hpc narrative so that absolute resource reductions can become part of it.