# Improving Compute Sustainability: A Case Study

[Two Sigma](https://yomu.fyi/company/two-sigma) · Emily Majewski · Oct 7, 2024

**Type:** Problem & solution

## 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.

**Tags:** [Architecture](https://yomu.fyi/topic/architecture), [Migrations](https://yomu.fyi/topic/migration), [Performance](https://yomu.fyi/topic/performance)

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