Computing will drive future electric growth

The supercomputer in the picture is MareNostrum, installed in an old chuch in Spain.


An interesting example is to look at the growth of supercomputing power consumption.  The biggest supercomputers in the world 10 years ago used about 500kw of power.  Today they are up at the 5 megawatt level.  At the current pace in 2020 they will be at 50 megawatts and by 2030, 500 megawatts. 

A modern nuclear reactor is about 1200 MW, a wind turbine 2 megawatts.  As the supercomputers grow in computational power they have more applications that we want to use them for.  The big pharmacuetical companies have estimated that they need 10 Petaflops of performance in order to do timely and useful simultions of biological interactions.  These are companies with 5 billion dollars a year in research budgets, so when it becomes useful they will not have a problem spending what it takes.

But right now the biggest 3 supercomputers in the world have just surpassed 1 Petaflop of performance.  But in under 5 years we should see 10 petaflop computers installed. 

Of course supercomputers are only one part of the world computing useage..and in 2010 a quite minor one.  There is hosting servers, datacenters, carrierhotels and cloud services.  And in the home there is more and more computing devices.  An estimate I saw said computing is already 20% of US electric demand and is growing at 10% a year.  That means just computing would cause a 2% growth in total US electric demand, all else being equal.

And 2% is a non-trivial amount for one year in a nation with 1,000 GW of installed capacity. That would require 20 gigawatts of new capacity to meet 2% demand growth.  Or 20 nuclear reactors.  (or 10,000 wind turbines).