Improving Compute Sustainability: A Case Study

Summary

Two Sigma's large computing footprint drives significant energy consumption and carbon emissions, particularly across live trading applications that require continuous real-time market data caching. To address this overhead without sacrificing performance, engineering teams used a routine hardware refresh to transition from legacy single-process machines to denser multi-core server configurations. By replacing roughly 60 legacy hosts with 28-core processor hardware, the team distributed baseline power draw over more cores and eliminated underutilized compute capacity. This architectural consolidation reduced absolute power consumption across production hosts by 66%, dropping electricity usage from 27 MWh in January 2023 to 10 MWh in January 2024. The initiative subsequently established an annual sustainability rationalization practice for hardware budgeting across the organization.

Context

Two Sigma operates hundreds of petabytes of data and high-volume daily market simulations, generating substantial electricity expenses and carbon emissions. Live trading applications require constant real-time data caching, precluding common efficiency measures like powering down idle servers or shifting workloads to ephemeral cloud environments.

Approach / What changed

During a routine hardware refresh, engineering teams replaced approximately 60 legacy single-process servers with denser 28-core processor machines, evaluating socket core counts, performance, and cache size to consolidate workloads and distribute fixed baseline server power across more active cores.

Takeaways

• Baseline power represents the majority of server electricity consumption, causing underutilized machines to draw nearly full baseline power regardless of their age or physical size.
• Deploying denser 28-core servers allowed the decommissioning of around 60 legacy servers, reducing absolute power consumption by 66% from 27 MWh in January 2023 to 10 MWh in January 2024.
• Evaluating power draw on a per-core basis revealed that newer Z generation servers lowered baseline power intensity from approximately 7 watt-hours per core to 4 watt-hours per core compared to legacy hardware.

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