Gilles Tourpe
Amazon
Gilles Tourpe is a technology leader with over two decades of experience in the field of High-Performance Computing (HPC). His journey began with his first work experience on a trading floor, which instilled in him a commitment to delivering practical and usable solutions for customers and partners. Prior to joining Amazon Web Services (AWS) in September 2019, Tourpe held various positions in technology companies, where he honed his expertise in HPC/HTC. At AWS, he covers multiple verticals, including Oil & Gas, Research, Automotive, Manufacturing, Financial Services, and Life Sciences, leveraging his deep understanding of the industry's needs. Gilles's passion for collaboration and partnership has been a driving force throughout his career. He represents AWS in the ETP4HPC organization (European Technology Platform for High Performance Computing), fostering cooperation within the HPC ecosystem. Additionally, he played a pivotal role in initiating the TERATEC Hackathon, a platform for developing HPC engineers. Recognizing the value of academic collaborations, Gilles has developed partnership agreements with the University of Luxembourg, enabling the Uni researchers to access latest AWS Graviton technology.
Session
Energy efficiency in computing becomes more and more important as climate change impacts intensify, energy costs increase, and efforts to reach the Sustainable Development Goals to tackle environmental, social and economic issues gain momentum. This is especially true for large-scale computing for research, including cloud computing, which underpin advancements and breakthroughs in many scientific domains. Achieving significant improvements in energy efficiency for such resource-intensive computing tasks, especially artificial intelligence methods including machine learning, deep learning and the new generation of large language models, is a complex challenge that requires a coordinated effort across hardware and software domains, as well as a large group of actors including infrastructure providers, system administrators, software developers, and researchers. Despite the rapid pace of technological development, many existing tools and platforms still lack essential features, such as detailed energy consumption metrics and granular task-level monitoring capabilities. Optimization of research computing workflows considering energy efficiency is also mostly overlooked. This panel discussion seeks to unite a diverse array of experts from the Netherlands, and potentially from the international community, to shed light on the current practices and challenges of energy-efficient computing, with a special focus on research. We aim to explore how energy efficiency is currently addressed within advanced computing, identify critical gaps, and discuss actionable steps to enhance collaboration and drive forward more energy-efficient practices. By fostering this exchange of ideas and experiences of different actors, we hope to contribute to the development of computing infrastructures and workflows that are not only powerful but also environmentally sustainable.
Panelists:
- Prof. Dr. Rob van Nieuwpoort (Leiden University)
- Gilles Tourpe (Amazon Web Services)
- Gijs van den Oord (Netherlands eScience Centre)
- Sagar Dolas (SURF)
- Adhitya Adhitya Bhawiyuga (University of Twente)