Energy-Aware Computing in the Year 2026
For researchers and practitioners in HPC and AI, this survey organizes existing work but offers no new results or quantitative comparisons.
This paper surveys energy-efficient computing in the HPC-cloud-edge continuum, focusing on the energy bottleneck of large-scale AI. It proposes a taxonomy covering hardware, software, and cooling techniques, and outlines a roadmap for sustainable computing.
High-Performance Computing (HPC) has recently entered the Exascale era, and considerable efforts are being made to fully harness this potential power for large-scale applications, such as cutting-edge generative AI (training and exploitation). The corresponding energy consumption is very high, and forecasts are alarming, making this metric a critical systemic bottleneck. Addressing this issue presents a genuine challenge for the entire cloud-edge-HPC continuum at all scales, from low-power IoT microcontrollers to multi-megawatt data centers. Beyond financial costs, green computing is driven by considerations related to climate change and environmental concerns such as carbon footprint ($CO_2e$), as well as constraints on energy production and supply, leading to a real need to regulate {\em information and communication technology} (ICT) activities. This article presents a comprehensive overview of energy-efficient computing, taking into account the most recent and significant contributions. Based on this exploration of the state of the art, we design and describe a holistic taxonomy of the aforementioned publications, structured around various perspectives, including {\em hardware and software aspects, measurement instrumentation, software optimizations, dynamic task scheduling, voltage scaling, workload consolidation, federated learning}, and {\em cooling}. Particular emphasis is placed on large-scale AI, which receives significant attention due to its considerable resource requirements. We conclude with an analysis of a forward-looking roadmap that considers the main perspectives of sustainable computing.