Sustainable Computing in an Era of Rising Hardware Costs and Slowing Per-Core Progress

About

The cost structure of computing hardware is undergoing a fundamental shift. Prices for accelerators, high-performance CPUs, memory, storage, and networking have risen due to architectural complexity, supply-chain constraints, and demand from AI and large-scale simulation. At the same time, single-core CPU performance gains have slowed, with overall improvements driven mainly by higher core counts. This combination—rising costs and diminishing per-core gains—has become particularly acute for memory and solid-state storage. Together, these trends are reshaping procurement strategies and the environmental footprint of research computing.

This talk examines how these changes alter hardware replacement economics and redefine sustainable computing. Frequent refresh cycles now compete with strategies focused on extending system lifetimes, selective upgrades, and optimizing software for parallel, heterogeneous platforms. Drawing on examples from large-scale scientific computing, it explores trade-offs between cost, performance, energy efficiency, and carbon impact, arguing that sustainability must incorporate economic and architectural drivers alongside energy considerations.

00:00:00 Slide 1

00:01:39 Slide 2

00:02:33 Slide 3

00:03:02 Slide 4

00:04:44 Slide 5

00:05:34 Slide 6

00:06:35 Slide 7

00:07:38 Slide 8

00:09:08 Slide 9

00:09:59 Slide 10