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Energy Efficient PC's?
eebly asks: "I'm working with a team at my school to help ensure that some of our new building projects are environmentally friendly. As part of that, we want to include good, energy efficient computers. The new building will be labs, so we can't sacrifice power. We're looking for suggestions on what machines use low amounts of power, techniques to make the machines run with less, and ways to tweak the software to make things like sleep mode get used more effectively."
If you are using Linux boxes, it is possible to do a full shutdown on modern hardware by calling the regular shutdown program from a screensaver like program. One would modify one of the activity moniter programs so it will shut the system down if there is no activity for a period of time. This would shut the system down over night, and durring slow days in the lab.
There is also a patch available that does HD spindown for Linux. From what I hear it now works on IDE drives. That alown will get you 5-10 Watts per machine.
The nightly scripts run by cron can have their run times changed so they are run just after lab close, then an automated shutdown run. Watch that you provide enough spacing between script runs so the previous one's output is available to the next script. This is important for the accounting scripts. You can even do some simple recoding of them to serialize them to shorten the time it takes to get them all done in the right sequence. This would allow one to have cron start them, then the last would shutdown the system when it is finished.