I don't know if its the right place to ask. I have read a lot of articles about exascale and found out that it may consumes approximately 20MW power envelope. Is it a daily basis or a yearly basis or in an instant?
Please enlighten me. Here are the papers I have used.
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~skeckler/pubs/SC_2014_Exascale.pdf
page 1:
One of the main challenges in achieving this goal is power consumption, which a range of HPC system operators have suggested be limited to 20 MW for a full exascale-capable system to mitigate cost of ownership and new power delivery infrastructure costs [2]
and
http://www.computermachines.org/joe/publications/pdfs/hpca2017_exascale_apu.pdf
page 1
An exascale supercomputer is envisioned to comprise of on the order of 100,000 interconnected servers or nodes in a target power envelope of ∼20MW, with sufficient memory bandwidth to feed the massive compute throughput, sufficient memory capacity to execute meaningful problem sizes, and with user intervention due to hardware or system faults limited to the order of a week or more on average [3]
Best Answer
MW (megawatts) is not a unit related to time, it is the power usage in a moment in time.
According to the formula P = V * I, P (in watts) is the product of voltage times current. I doubt the computer uses standard 120V of 220V but let's assume it does, it means the computer uses 20MW = 110V * I => I = about 180 kA (kiloamperes).
To translate this in time, the unit kWh is used (kilowatt-hour), meaning the average number of kilowatts used over one hour. Thus if this computer would be on full power for one hour, it would consume 20 MWh.