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Price of Power in a Data Center
mstansberry writes "Much like the rest of the country, IT is facing an energy crisis. The utilities are bracing companies for price spikes this winter and according to experts and IT pros, those prices aren't going to come down any time soon. This is thefirst article in a four-part series investigating the impact of energy issues on IT."
Tell everyone to stop folding http://folding.stanford.edu/ ?
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
P.S. The submitter has a nice fishing web site and is holding about a 12" trout on his main page. Nice catch ... but I'd
recommend he go on a
fishing charter
in Seward Alaska if he wants to catch some mongo fish.
This trip was a major slayfest and my brother was
Captain
Crudd who knows how to fish with a beer in his hand.
it was a extra $200 a month. ouchy.
We have a page on our site with some calculations on how much energy is being saved because we're using Linux VServer and why dedicated servers are not environmentally-friendly (at least not with the current technology - this may change). The numbers are probably off a bit, but they give you some idea.
Also the street price for a 20A circuit in a datacenter is $200-$300, while the cost of a megabit is $100 or less. So a rack of servers that requires two power circuits and pushes 3Mbps (not an unusual scenario) costs twice as much in power than in bandwidth.
And here's another article on this issue. And another.
Energy prices are going to hurt everybody.
From here:
"EIA expects energy expenditures will be 18% higher this winter compared to last winter, which will be 8.3% of the annual gross domestic product, a record since 1987 when it was 8.4%."
And for those of you who want to find a way to save energy: Here's 60 Tips To Save Energy This Winter
Run the heat in the winter with Intel chips! Just do batch-processing, or some intense rendering work.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Oil still costs about $15 to pump out of the ground, but instead of the $25 price before we invaded Iraq, it's pushing $70+ as a "permanent high". Maybe Congress and the White Hosue can exercise some accountability for their totally failed energy policies (including sending us to war) by stopping the price gouging the oil corporations are abusing us with. I know those corporations are their best bribers^Wcontributors, and their foreign sources are our best traitors^Wallies, but Americans will vote on the entire House of Representatives and 1/3 of the Senate in elections next year. We might be willing to put up with a lot of BS on faith, but there's no denying we're not getting the spoils of all of our "superpower" status.
--
make install -not war
so why would intel have new chips that suck so much power. check my site!
Pedal faster!!
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
"It's the other side of Moore's Law," Sneider said. "As the cost of [buying] these machines decreases, the cost of powering and cooling them increases."
I don't agree with this. How power efficient was Eniac? Also, my laptop lasts much longer the one I had a few years back. I think we're making progress on the power front, but the demand for computing power is attracting more and more dollars, the power cost is largely insignificant with regards to the return on investment.
No Sigs!
How much power loss is due to ludicrous numbers of layers of processing that go on in modern OSes and applications?
Time for the OS vendors to realize that smaller, efficient code footprints will save money in real world terms.
Then again, I code in java for a living (Ducks)
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Because of Global warming?
And the cost of extracting a ton of coal hasn't changed much from 1995 to 2005. But it shows what a sham commodity trading is - the price of a ton of coal (because it is 'energy' related) is traded relative to the price of a barrel of oil or the cost of a cfu of natural gas.
All this does is further underline the boom/bust cycles of the energy business and how it negatively affects the economy.
This is thefirst article in a four-part series investigating the impact of energy issues on IT.
Does this mean three slashdot dupes forthcoming?
Materials needed: Fans. Flexible duct. Duct tape (of course).
Procedure: Place fans in datacenter. Tape duct to fans. Route duct to office spaces.
Results: Save money on heating and cooling bills.....
Just on the cusp of hydrogen fuel cell techonology becoming available, we're about to be hit hard with spikes in both gas and electricity. The SK crown corporation SaskEnergy asked the rate review panel for a 41% increase, but the review panel recommended "only" 27%. Auto gas prices have soared as high as $1.20/litre but have settled back at about a $1 CDN. Natural gas though is what scares Canadians, since most heat their homes with either that or electricity.
Sask Power is running advertising imploring people to unplug their underused second fridge, turn off their computers when not in use, and upgrade to LDC screens to save about 66% the power expense over CRT technology. They claim savings of $50/year if you turn off your computer when it's not in use.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
... did they get the idea for this article from Cringely's most recent column?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The end user might actually benefit from this if it spurs some more innovation in the low-power computing sector. We as computer users take our power consumption for granted, IMO, when there are places in the world lacking the electricity for a simple light bulb.
In general this will pass along additional costs to the end user, similar to how the price of oil adds cost to our everyday consumables. I am curious as to how many tons of coal/gas/uranium or whatever power source you fancy is produced by us computer users en masse. I think an answer to this would stagger us all.
I could see the truth if I was blind.
HP just came out with multicore half-height blades. Their latest requirements are 30 amp, three phase power per PDU for a blade rack, with 4 pdus/rack for redundancy. That's enough power service to cover 3 modern 3000 square foot homes when you factor the energy back to 240 volts.
Getting the power to something this silly isn't the pain. COOLING something that consumes 14KW in a 4 square foot space is the challenge anyone in data center management faces. Both HP and IBM have come out with the "innovation" of heat exchangers that run off your chilled water loop. Some of us have been there and done that and don't want to try it again.
Every time someone comes to me selling density and physical consolidation, I throw them out on their ass. It's cheaper to just buy or build more traditional raised floor space and run good old fashioned 6, 4, or 2u servers than to cool a bunch of blade racks.
STFU & GBTW
Much of the energy used is for air conditioning. One might think that this would be easy for data centers in Michigan, but I've worked for places that heat the building and air condition the data center in January. One place had the data center a/c die, and a box fan in a window allowed everything to run. A box fan has to be cheaper to run than a/c. So what we might see is smarter environmental control. At least in the winter, it makes sense to run outside air in, and use the waste heat to heat the rest of the building.
Perhaps data centers could be moved to Canada.
-- Stephen.
FTA:"Historically, I haven't managed the electric bill. But now we're aware and interested in it," Doherty said. "If I told my boss that my staff wanted a 27% increase [in pay], I'd be downstairs on the carpet."
First, it's good that he's paying attention to the electric bill now. But he should have been paying attention to it in the past (last year saw a spike in prces, too). TCO and all that. Of course, electricity may be negligible compared to other costs, depending on their setup.
Second, it's highly unlikely that a 27% boost to electricity costs is anywhere near as much as a 27% boost in salaries. Furthermore, salaries are more controllable internally.
Good for him to point it out though.
Of interest, one of my company's vendors has been assessing us a fuel surcharge for a couple years now (though shipping & distribution is not a core function of theirs). They are now adding a "utilities" surcharge to their invoices... due to management relationships, we're stuck with this vendor, who has raised our effective rates 18% in the past two years. Anyone else have a similar experience?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Shouldn't there be an initiative to certify computer systems as "low energy", i.e. using low power processors, come with LCD monitors, etc?
Just as the state of Massachusetts chose to use F/OSS to save in office software, why not asking government offices to replace CRT's with LCD monitors?
This isn't really a new problem, as you can see from this article dated January 5, 2001. From the article: Amazingly, a large hosted-server operation can average the same power usage as a steel manufacturing plant.
do.what.promptcmds
mention that much of the power loss and heat generation is due to thousands of power supplies in each data center. If data center racked computers used DC power, the power conversion takes place in one area, and only heat generated by power usage is generated in the data center. This reduces power losses due to multiple AC/DC conversions, as well as the heat generated in those conversions. Less heat means less AirCon is needed, so less power there too. This is such a simple thing to do as well. Most huge telecom or carrier grade equipment is buit for -48vdc operations. The ROI for running DC data centers is even money in very few months of operation. The equipment already exists, so its not new, just needs to be implemented.
Additionally, when your data center power is DC, the AC source can be from anywhere, meaning that if you find a local generation facility that is cheap to run, you can reduce the amount of energy that you have to purchase from the grid.
The trick to making aircon units efficient is not generating the heat in the first place. Despite what CPU heat there is, power conversion accounts for huge amounts of data center heat.
Try replacing CRTs with LED displays too, less heat generated, less power used, less aircon required.
IMHO, replacing CPUs to save energy is the least 'bang for buck' energy savings thing you can do, even if it is popular to talk about. The only place it really matters to people is in laptops.... The data center is a place they could care less about CPU heat... for the most part.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
your life ambition has been accomplished, you have achieved a first post on /. you may die now... (please)
I bought myself a watt meter to measure the power of some of my home electronics. So I tested my friend's laptop, it was a Dell, 15 inch monitor P4. Under linux the laptop was drawing 50-100watts (which is very high for a laptop), under windows it was drawing from 30-50 watts. Linux on desktops has the same power management as windows on desktops though.
... is going to be the new benchmark. Sun is already heading in that direction with their low-power AMD offerings, and even more so with the new
Niagara systems. When the other vendors get their acts together, expect them to follow suit.
I've never been a big fan of laptops, I enjoy installing new video cards too much to like an un-upgradable lappy. But with power the way it is, and the nearly silent operation of a laptop, I really have to consider it. I use my computer for TV, and music, and the fans are getting so loud along with the hard drives, that I just don't think I will go the desktop route again. Even if I don't tote my laptop around and instead use it as a "silent" and low power-use desktop, I'm beginning to think it's a better investment than another desktop.
Has anyone bought a laptop-like desktop [without an integrated LCD for instance] and been satisfied playing either games or watching TV/DVD on it?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Let's be realistic, they won't come down...ever. If they can get another 20% (example) out of you this year, do you think they're going to drop it 20% next year after the "crisis"? 10% even? No way. Just like any other energy business that is at a near-monopoly level (gasoline), they can raise it whenever they feel like it and blame it on whatever they want. What are you going to do, go to the competition? In the area I live in (Midland, Michigan) and the surrounding cities (Saginaw, Bay City, Flint, etc) we get ONE choice for gas and electricity - Consumer's Energy. That's it. You don't like their service or prices? Tough shit. You're stuck. There have been "alternative companies" in the past, but all they do is resell energy for Consumers Energy - it's all going through the same pipes and wires.
It sucks, but that's the way it is.
Content Management System: A pretentious way of saying "text editor."
This is subject to debate, but experience having worked in a datacenter has shown me that one of the problems is that of all the computing power that occupies a typical datacenter, 90% of it is redundant overhead that never gets used. Still, these servers just sit there, sucking electricity and requiring expensive HVAC to maintain.
I knew a wise man once who said that in theory, if your CPU usage isn't 100% all the time, you're wasting money. This is at least partially true. We have many many servers who are idle most of the time, and even at "peak periods" the load average barely budges. One of the services we support is RAM-heavy, but uses almost *no* CPU whatsoever, still, our clients specify pipe-hitting four-way boxes with large disk arrays--one box per service. Ludicrous!
By combining several services on a single box, you can eliminate the need to host extra/redundant servers, and save a bunch of cash in the process. Sure, it may be less convenient to administer, but let's face it, folks, any move toward consolidating deployments in the datacenter is only going to save space/money.
Now, that being said, most people could care less, thinking "hardware's cheap" and they'll just throw dozens of boxes at the problem and forget about it. Maybe that will change, maybe not...
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Nonetheless, having the computer repetitively recompute the exact same answers (parse that huge XML config file! JIT-compile that Java app, AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN!) is an exercise in keeping your hardware vendor happy, and a sign of laziness on the part of programmers. Who among us doubts that one AMD64 with a few gigs of RAM could, if programmed properly, calculate the payroll for the entire USA every night?
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
A company I used to work for piped the heat from the datacenter to the rest of the building, and apparently saved a lot of money.
At home, my office is upstairs. I close all of the upstaris heating vents during the winter. My computers keep it warm enough. (And in Minnesota, that's saying something!)
http://cubemonkey.net/quotes -- fortune-mod quote generator
It sounds like Linux was running the laptop at a higher clock rate. Many laptops have a configurable clock rate, and will turn the rate down when power savings are needed (for example, when AC power disappears and the laptop switches to battery power).
A little fiddling with the power controls of Linux would probably get it to the same power consumption as Windows. While you measured something real, it's probably a configuration issue more than a builtin Linux vs. Windows difference.
Good to know that it's only the USA that has any concerns over use of power, global warming and all that.
God Bless America!
If I look at my own guilty fact sheet, I can see that I'm guilty of the following...
On the plus side, I have converted to LCD's whenever I nave needed to replace a monitor. It's a start, but a small one.
Since I have been looking at low power home servers for myself, I have started to look at the power used by the servers at work. There is allot of crap, mostly Windows stuff, that I run on solo servers. I'm sure I need no explain the reasoning behind that, but it's clear that it's not really efficient.
We have been looking at VM Ware and Xen with an eye towards reducing the number of hardware devices we need to have space and cooling and spare parts for, but The power consumption savings alone may be enough to tip the balance with Management.
Has anyone done a nice comparison of power usage after smushing 7 or 8 systems into 2 VM Ware boxes?
Eschew Obfuscation
Capitalism is all about supply and demand and the cost of buying A vs B vs doing without.
A barrel of oil may cost $x to pump out of the ground, deliver, process, and burn and coal may cost a fraction of that for the same energy-equivalent.
But it doesn't matter. As long as the demand at either of those prices exceeds supply, the open-market price of both will be about the same and will be higher than the "production" costs.
When the demand is between the two "production costs" that one will be heavily favored, possibly knocking the more expensive one off the market entirely until prices rise or production costs go down.
By the way, even within the same commodity, you have this effect:
Oil in some places is dirt-cheap to produce. In others it is so expensive to extract that nobody bothers unless they think oil prices will stay high enough to make it worthwhile. But once it gets out of the ground, it's just oil.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Perhaps some planning needs to go into the building and location of these centres. Use the heat dissipation in a secondary system, place the actual building in a cooler climate or in a north facing direction etc, etc. These may be small things but when running huge systems it all adds up. The place i work has its servers and coms equipment located in a porta-cabin! Boy does it get hot.
My own personal opinion is that this is something we've brought upon ourselves. Both citizens and corporations who are not in the electricity business.
I've never understood why some industries allow things to happen that cause themselves to suffer while a small set of industries make enormous profit.
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co
All of our servers run on reliable, inexpensive, sweet beautiful coal!
I think this entire subject needs to be prefaced with a discussion about Peak Oil. Several books have been written about the impending energy crisis, most notably, Beyond Oil : The View from Hubbert's Peak.
What really interests me is the usual human nature reaction to this. Government, business and the public at large seem to think that their "wish", that things continue as they always have continued, will ensure a continued cheap and easy to access energy supply.
Sure, Coal and Nuclear can and probably will supply our forseeable electrical needs, but what about transportation? Jet fuel, overseas shipping, etc?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
If problems start at tempetures above 80F, and you keep your temperature about around 75F, you have less time available if and when some system or enviroment changes suddenly making your tempeture rise. If you by default have set the tempeture to 60F, you will get lot more time react before you run to 1) problems and 2) to serious problems. So, to asses risk, I would prefer to having more colder place, than a place being near a limit where after problems arise. Just my two cents.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
As some predicted the arab peninsula being covered in solar panels for the time we are completely out of oil, I would make a note on solar power hosting as a sooner or nearer future.
I can imagine a huge installation in the middle of the desert running all the it buried below ground level in the cold, using minimum cooling energy, one level up, the staff and offices, using natural light channeled in thru tricky optics, airconditioned in natural ways and using solar power....
OK, I am an idiot, but It would just make sense, besides I have something with warm places..... I know I could save a fortune just with a few computers running at my house using the 12 hours of straight sunlight in the dry season, and even save some in the rainy season.
I also have to mention that a lot of money goues out of the window for cooling purposes in computing environments so just making the installations a little bit more energy-sane would make a serious saving on cooling energy (e.g. I have seen server rooms in the most stupid locations, where cooling cost 5x + more).
Does anyone have ever made a calculation (or have a link to) on how many square meters of solar panels would power a given server/worstation in different light conditions?
OK, do not flame I wrote, a given workstation because old pII-233 with LCD is different from 2 21" crts and a 4-proc renderer with 10 disks.
As an international student currently living in the US, it is quite shocking to see how Americans waste electric power. It is simply not logical why people have to bring sweaters to be comfortable during the scorching summer (because the thermostat is set too low) whereas in winter, buildings become furnaces.
I won't even get started on the obscene generation of trash.
Hopefully these crises well force Americans to find ways of making themselves more efficient.
If you had one power source dumping all the voltages most computers need, you'd have a lot of small wires or several very fat ones. I'm not saying it's not do-able it's just something to consider.
If your main power supply gave you -48vdc, you can get away with smaller wires but you'll need dc/dc transformers to bring the voltage down.
It would help solve the heat problem though.
TANSTAAFL.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I made a typo a few minutes ago and said "LDC", but LED is the wrong technology. It's the kind of display used in clock radios with red blocky displays, if you aren't sure about the difference.
My power company is advertising a power savings of 66% by switching to an LCD from CRT montior. And they are telling people that a screen saver does not power down a CRT so they are still paying for power while it's on.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subthreshold_leakage
"Subthreshold leakage is the current that flows from the drain to source of a MOSFET when the transistor is supposed to be off.
In the past the subthreshold leakage of transistors has been very small, but as transistors have been scaled down, subthreshold leakage can compose nearly 50% of total power consumption."
Perhaps the government should have imposed restrictions on the energy consumption of CPUs earlier. All we've done is feeding the CPU's with more power so they become "more powerful".
It's a pity that it's only when CPU's can't get any more efficient that chip manufacturers start researching on "performance per watt"...
Hey, we all have interns dont we? Give them a exercycle with a generator attached.. Problem solved.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This guy's got a point. There's no reason to expect that the prices of energy will remain constant. The pressures of the energy market will make companies to generate more revenue to stay profitable or force them to evolve and become efficient and use less resources.
It's funny how the US loves capitalism but sometimes refuses to accept the forces of the market.
This site FutureCrisis has an excellent daily update of the energy crisis and current/upcoming fossil fuel shortages. It really gives you a pulse on the way things are going as it compiles credible energy info every day - and the trends aren't looking good.
Back when I built my last computer (1.8 Ghz P4) all I saw everywhere I looked was AMD processors catching fire. Every hardware site I checked out seemed to have scary pictures of AMD procs with flames coming out of them about .08 seconds after the heat sink was yanked off.
I love my home more than my computer so in the name of safety I went with a P4. _NOW_ all I hear is "Intels are hot! Ewwww! Hot Intels! Hot Intels coming at ya'!
Sheesh. Make up my mind already. >:|
What percentage of a data center's revenue does power consume? What percentage of its expenses? If a cost that accounts for 2% of a company's revenues doubles, that's not good, but it's hardly a crisis.
Fuel accounted for 17% of Southwest Airlines' revenue, for example. A data center would have to be less than that, wouldn't it?
The biggest help would be a power-saving feature for the CPUs that when idle they go into a sort of sleep mode and turn off some parts to save power, but I don't recall ever seeing this option on anything but Disk Drives.
It's already here. Once all processes on a system are blocking (waiting for something else to happen), the kernel normally executes a HLT (halt) instruction that waits for the next interrupt. Intel processors have reduced power consumption when executing HLT for as long as I can remember. Intel Pentium M processors also have SpeedStep technology. When not overridden by software, SpeedStep cuts the multiplier and the voltage when available power is reduced.
....yet IKEA is charging me 300$ for their furniture.
Gosh, I'd better call my fucking representative, those goddamn Swedes are screwing me.
Why is it that IT nerds are so stupid at everything else in life?
What's important to realise is that this power isn't just being consumed by servers doing the flops, but (as anyone living in Las Vegas will well know) it's cooling that's soaking up all the juice. The article's probably right about the cost soaring in the near future, but mainly because cooling systems will rely ever more heavily on liquid and active cooling measures.
On an unrelated note, I wonder if anyone (like our good friends Microsoft) will do some studies into which OS will consume the most energy? Would it be Windows, turning up the thermostat with it's multiple unused processes, or Linux, it's kernel threading model making it the most efficient multi-purpose space-heater?
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
More and more players are entering the virtual market (look at the success of Citrix over the past decade, which is a technology that comes from a similar paradigm) - and that means that more and more datacenters are converting. While the cost per kwh might be rising, the costs of running a data-center are coming back under control.
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
-Voltaire
I had an LED watch in the 70's!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The monitor probably wont last 12 years
But in my experience, an LCD will tend to last longer than a CRT of the same size for the same reason that transistors last longer than tubes in any other application.
I agree that crisis is not the correct term for energy price increases however it is becoming a great concern for everyone. I see this concern as a needed factor to promote chip innovation.
/. Your server gets hammered. A solution could be load balancing but that usually requires that all of the nodes be online all of the time. What if processing nodes could boot almost instantly using flash memory or RAM disks from a powered off state? The master node would request processing nodes to power up based on need and power off when not needed. Instead of hard drives, RAM disks would be used. A small amount of voltage would be supplied to the RAM at all times.
I am glad to see the widespread adoption of hybrid cars and SUVs in the United States. By widespread I mean that automakers are actually promoting hybrid technology. In my lifetime (I am 21) I don't think we will find a source of energy that will replace gasoline in automobiles. People cite Hydrogen as a source but most the available Hydrogen production is a byproduct of fossil fuel refining. Currently, solar panels are far to expensive and the production methods require vasts amounts of energy (often more than the panel will ever produce) Of course the majority of the energy used to producce the panels comes from fossil fuels.
Power production from Wind is a risky venture at best for most of the country. There are only a few select locations where there is sustained wind. These locations should be used to their potential. Also, electric only cars will only become accepted if they can recharge in the same amount of time it takes you to fill your gas tank. I drive a Honda Insight. It takes about sixty seconds to fill up and I can drive it in town for 2-3 weeks before I need to fill it up again. I typically get 375 in town miles and around 550 highway miles on a single tank.
I have always been a supporter of nuclear energy however I don't think America is ready for a nuclear reactor under the hood. Besides, the evil dooers could use them for WMDs.
So, right now it appears fossil fuels will continue to be the primary source of energy. I would like to see a cleaner alternative but am glad consumers finally have a choice. Like everything, burning fossil fuels is ok in moderation. Our problem is that the earth cannot absorb our output fast enough. This is just my opinion of course.
I would hope the chip designers would give the consumer and business alike an alternative. Design desktops and servers to lower their voltage to the CPU when the system is idle. I have an Asus board with an Athlon64 3500+ that has this capability and I use it. I am sure there are many servers out there sitting idle yet running at full power. Hopefully businesses will realize this and buy technology that is adaptive based load.
Here's an idea I have been thinking about since we are on this subject. Why not have a system that acts as a cluster but only the needed nodes are used. For instance, you are running a website. Most of the time a single server can handle the load perfectly. Some jackass posts a link to your site on the frontpage of
Of course you could buy servers with CPUs that are effecient. You would still be wasting energy during idle times.
These of course are my original thoughts. Companies should not take them from me unless of course they thought of it first. In that case, please do not sue me for thinking creatively. Perhaps you could hire me. Perhaps not. Either way, don't be an asshat. Turn off the (light/computer/whatever) when you are not using it. The energy companies operate on demand. If there is less demand, they will produce less energy, and we will all benefit.
LED is the wrong technology. It's the kind of display used in clock radios with red blocky displays
Not anymore. Displays built of organic light-emitting diodes have the potential to bring power consumption even lower than LCD because OLED doesn't need a backlight.
Got an email from one of the data centers we use (highly recommended dc, btw) yesterday. They report their electricity rates have risen 50% since 2002. Effective from 1 December they'll be charging an extra $6/server (for individually co-loed servers) or $1.25/amp on cabinets/racks.
You wouldn't want to be a $29/month dedicated server provider soaking up that kind of cost increase.
We happen to use mostly dual Xeon servers. They come with 500W power supplies and I'm pretty sure they soak up a good proportion of that power. The power price increases appear to be yet another reason to switch to AMD (with their CPUs' lower power consumption).
--
Powerful and Power efficient VPSs
The other day I was wondering why my laptop (12" G4 1.25Ghz) was taking so long to process an image. I found it was unplugged, plugged it in, and saw the progress bar noticeably speed up.
I don't know about you guys, but I've got a 37 1/2 KVA UPS along with the Liebert running....
Yikes....I'm glad we don't have our own power meter!
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Outsource to Canada. Cheap hydro power, and all the cold you could want.
This has been coming for some time and I believe it will, over the long run, result in some fundamental changes in how IT data centers are built. Think about how much energy is spent spinning CPU fans to blow heat off the CPU and out into the room and then how much more energy is spent on HVAC to transport that heat out of the room. Much of the energy spent is on moving air and chilled water around. Those costs can be greatly reduced if some basic architecture changes are made.
Imagine an entire rack of water cooled servers. The warm/cold nipples have a quick disconnect feature that prevents the loss of water when the units are pulled from the rack Chilled water is pumped directly to the racks and the warm water sent directly to the chiller. This chiller might be outdoors so the heat can be exhausted from the building, or it could be indoors where it is used to heat the building in areas where heating is required to maintain the building climate. All the fans in all the servers are now gone. Air conditioning load is greatly reduced. Energy costs associated with running the data center are reduced. It might even help in disaster situations where an active chiller has failed or there isn't enough power for it. If the system degrades to the point where all you have is a pump and a fan, you might still be able to provide enough cooling to run servers for a considerable period. Coolant would be pumped to a radiator unit where fans could blow air through to dump heat. I am not even sure a pump would be required if the radiator/chiller is on the roof. The entire system might be made to work using convection. In that case, some cooling could be provided without using any pump at all. Warm water would rise to the roof, pass through the radiator and sink back down to the data center.
Will the industry develop a standard chilled water cooling interconnect system for servers? Who knows. If energy costs get high enough, they might. Just something to think about but getting rid of all those fans would sure make the data center a lot nicer place to work in without all that darned nose from the fans. There are lots of things that could be done to make a data center more efficient. Most will require some "out of the box" thinking, though.
The average desktop uses a power supply which is approximately 65% efficient (based on power factor). I'm not sure if servers are better than this as I've only checked one. If they're not, then it would be a good idea to switch to better power supply designs. Correcting the power factor would allow for a decrease in power usage with the only disadvantage being a slightly higher cost.
I can't help but nitpick on this. They're not price "spikes" if they don't come back down. What the article is describing are price "hikes."
Because, quite obviously, oil didn't cost as much then.
So many geeks clamor for the latest and greatest video card, then upgrade to a new one every year or so. Ditto for CPUs. In reality, if they were concerned about conserving power, they'd make due with what they had. And really, is it worth all the power that goes into creating a high-end video card, plus all the power it takes when in use (yes, they use less power when you're not running 3D apps), just so you can get some high frame rates in Half-Life 2 or F.E.A.R. or whatever? Now oil is 3x more expensive, and all of a sudden there's great worry.
On a side note, the current push it toward multi-core CPUs. Honestly, no one has made a multi-core CPU that uses less power than a single-core equivalent (and if they did, they could just drop the second core and they'd be there). Clearly the drive is toward using more energy, even if there's no clear benefit for many people.
It would be better to feed the equipment 220vac or 208vac instead of 48vdc. iirc, 208v based on a 3 phase feed should be most efficient since it requires one less transformer to step it down. Switched power supplies don't use resistance to regulate voltage, so the lower voltage won't really help at all with heat produced from regulating down to 12v. Every server I've ever seen was capable of handling 208v or 220v. A 48v setup would require more expensive power supplies and will cause higher resistance in the wiring, unless the wire gauge is increased accordingly which is very expensive.
I work for the government, indirectly, I work for a state university. Now at my department we would LOVE to go to all LCDs. Basically any new system we buy has an LCD instead of CRT. However we are not replete with money, we cannot afford to replace old systems, much less old monitors. I would say we still have 100-200 CRTs in use. Well, if the tax payers would like those replaced, we'd be happy to oblige, but we'll need the money first. I'd say it would cost $20,000-$60,000. Now that's just our department, we are one of hundreds (albeit a big one). I'd say it would be a several million dollar job campus wide. This is just one university, not to mention all the others, the state offices, local offices, primary schools, etc.
What it comes down to is nice idea, but it needs to start from an initative to get the money, not a demand on the state IT groups. Asking us to replace it isn't going to get anything done because we lack the funds. So if this is something you are serious about, look in to getting a ballot measure added to have a temporary tax increase to fund something like this.
My bad, I thought using the back button had caused my post to not go through.
-GameMaster
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
People cite Hydrogen as a source but most the available Hydrogen production is a byproduct of fossil fuel refining
Actually Iceland is doing quite well in working with hydrogen, "Iceland launches energy revolution". However Iceland has a big advantage over other countries, they have an abundance of geothermal energy they can use to generate hydrogen from water.
FalconShould there be a Law?
There is really no short-term method governments can control "price gouging" outside of price caps (which is fixing an upper limit on price). Long-term the real issue is caused by the target industry's regulations which create artificial entry barriers.
u ging pricing above the market when no alternative retailer is available. There are plenty of alternative wholesalers and retailers in the global and domestic oil and gas market. The only real reason for lack of alternative retailers would be when government regulation impedes market entry.
People use the term "price gouging" anytime they percieve the price of a good is too high. This is a fallicy. The definition of price gouging is http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=price+go
I would argue what people percieve as "price gouging" is actually beneficial to a majority of consumers. Lets take the gas situation in Louisana immediately after Katrina as an example. The demand for gas increased substantially due to evacuation and rebuilding efforts. In a free market, this would quickly drive the price of gas well above its production costs. Louisana has "price gouging" laws, so retailers were not able to price gas at market levels. The first few consumers bought all the "cheaper" gas they could carry away and everyone else got nothing. None of the retailers were interested to hang around in the bad conditions and try to acquire and sell more gas. They knew they wouldn't earn substantial profits doing so. They got out of town, to come back and sell gas when conditions were better and it was more easily available.
If those retailers had been able to price gas at market levels, the first few consumers would have purchased only the gas they needed and not all they could get away with. The next group of consumers would have been able to acquire some much needed gas also at more expensive prices, instead of getting none. When the gas in storage was gone, those retailers would have looked at their pile of cash and said, "My goodness I like this. I am going to stick around in the miserable conditions and do whatever it takes to get more gas in here to sell." Now the 3rd group of consumers that got no gas with "price gouging" laws would be able to purchase some newly delivered and even more expensive gas. I think most consumers that got no gas would have been willing to pay a lot more for a little bit of gas.
"These prices are high because of risk, not insufficient supply."
Risk is priced into the supply curve that shows how much producers are willing to supply at each price point. If risk increases, it pulls the supply curve in. Producers are willing to supply less at any price, moving the quantity demanded lower and price higher back into market equilibrium. It is inherent to the market economy and most feel it is much better than a government managed economy. Think of how much dispute and consternation is put into political process in this country; now imagine if the same thing happened with every economic production and sales decision.
"China, our enemy."
You might want to rethink this. We might not agree with China's political decisions right now, but the only reason the US is not taking a harder stance with China is they are our best friend and savior economically. They produce commodity goods for us much more efficiently than we can, allowing us to buy more than we otherwise could and keep our standard of living higher. They are the largest holder of our currency, keeping its value stable enough to remain the world standard currency. They also finance our obscene deficits both public and private, allowing us to keep our economy and the world economy out of recession.
While killing services and cutting back on powered equipment is an option people should consider efficiency improvements.
:) And there are other 80plus manufacturers, its just that this is the only one I tested.
Speaking from experience, a large number of x86 boxes out there are running on power supplies which run in the 60 to 70 percent efficiency range. By replacing old low efficiency power supplies with some of the newer 80plus supplies you will save on electricity for the box and for cooling.
I did some tests with replacing a cheap 250 watt low efficiency power supply with Seasonic 250 watt 80 plus supplies and found a 20%+ reduction in power consumption at the AC outlet. When I ran the numbers the savings in electricity to the power supply alone would pay for the new supply in one year. And that does not include the saving in air conditioning costs.
http://www.seasonic.com/
And no I don't work for them or own stock.
burnin
Sounds like you should really take a look at http://silentpcreview.com/
If ANYONE is to be blamed it is the traders and their panic that drove prices high.
And you don't think traders are part of a free market?
FaclonShould there be a Law?
While Pebble bed reactors are safer and potentially more efficient there's still a problem with long term storage of the waste. Also there's the question about what happens to the power plant itself once it has reached it's lifespan.
FalconShould there be a Law?
This is exactly the sort of thing that the operating system needs to figure out for itself if Linux is ever going to widely accepted as a desktop and laptop system.
Perfectly reversible computing does not produce heat.
Ever wondered what happens to bits that you erase out of memory or a register? They get dumped out of the chip and turn into heat.
Reversible logic reuses the electrical charge for your next computation, or for storing the next 1 that comes along.
On the downside, reversible hardware is much harder to design, but any addition of reverible logic on today's CPUs would decrease the amount of electricity needed and heat produced.
Electricity bills would be lower, and heat output would be smaller.
Laptops would last much longer, desktops wouldn't need a CPU cooler.
Even better, we could continue increasing the speed and diesize of CPUs.
One problem right now is that AMD, Intel, IBM, etc are perfectly able to produce a CPU that they have no hope of cooling. If reversible logic were used instead, you could have a 6GHz chip with the heat output of a 4.77 MHz 8086.
Shae Erisson - ScannedInAvian.com
When the product triples its price, thereby at least quintupling its profits, sufficient to cripple the world's biggest economy, that's not a market with alternatives that allow competition to accurately set prices. That's a gamed market.
And just because Bush has made us dependent on the Chinese mafia government buying our debt to prop up their insane $3TRILLION budget while they cut taxes on the people with extra money (whose corporations are the only beneficiaries of our screwed up economy), doesn't mean China isn't our enemy. It means that we are sacrificing our strength to our enemy's advantage. They're not "more efficient", they just accept slavery and misery as part of the cost, because their government forces them to.
How about the simpler explanation of these fundamental macroeconomics: Bush and his corporate cronies have so little in common with most Americans that they're more closely allied to China slave labor masters than to us. So they bleed us on oil while undermining our jobs. Eventually the US will stop demanding China fix its political and labor exploitation, because the Chinese won't prop us up if we don't play along. A little later the Chinese will demand the US government "do something" about the "unbalanced power" of labor organizations that "unfairly compete" with China's production. You can fill in the blank.
Really, I'm nauseated by your justification of China's grip on our addiction to oil and debt. Communist slave labor and pollution is "more efficient"? Our "savior"? Only if you're a fascist.
--
make install -not war
Elastic demand is along the lines of total profits or in this case computer power goes up at a greater rate for every percentage in price per unit of processor power is effectively lowered.
So if my price for a cpu was $100 I'd be able to sell 1000 units that have 100 units of processing power. Eventually I make an advancement and drop the price by 10% and increase my processing power by 10% so now the price is $90 with 110 units of processing power, now because of elastic demand I end up selling 2000 units instead of 1000. This literally increases the over all power requirements by 100%.
Now I'm sure you'd say "hey we have twice the processing power, so it stands to logic that we would only need to run our machines for half the time, and in turn use only half the power"
Well anyone who has windows or plays games knows that the software guys will find someway to put all those extra cycles to good use, effectively leaving us right back where we were in terms of power use. I mean come on I'm using more computing power typing this response than NASA had on hand to fly a mission to the moon.
In the case of research there are rarely any instances were a researcher is running all the data they need for a project. It tends to be a compromise between the price of the number crunching, the time it takes, and the amount of data.
Most power saving on bleeding edge laptops and desktops is in power scheduling schemes and not in an overall drop in power useage. When it comes to grinding numbers for research your machines are rarely going into any kind of sleep mode or low power mode. Instead they tend to be running flat out consuming their max power rating.
I'll conceed to this, overall power consumption per cycle is dropping. The NASA computers for the moon shot filled rooms and probably required their own power station. So my use of about 500watts is miserly compared to their 20,000-50,000watts of power, but again elastic demand rears it's ugly head there as there are now are tens of millions of 500watt machines being added to the pile every year because of modest drops in price and increases in overall cpu power.
China Apologists will be first up against the wall during the civil war of 2017. You state 'they produce goods cheaper', at what cost to American businesses and consumers? How much of our infrastucture is now gone, transferred to some asiatic shithole becuase they pay people shitty salaries? Really look into your math.
..and run all that waste heat through a stirling cycle generator? Not perpetual motion, but beats *dumping it* outside and they could probably get quite a bit of electric back..
It is very interesting to see that Hastert is very much a politician. Nothing in his blog says anything about law. He is talking about how oil companies shouldn't be rewarded since they aren't investing in America or doing anything to lower oil prices. But why does the speaker of the house of representatives care about oil prices or investing in America? It isn't his job to punish or reward anyone for anything. His job is to create and update laws to protect the citizens: not to promote investment in America, or fight injustice.
Still, it is early to tell. I would very much like to see what these guys on Capitol Hill think about each day. Maybe representation will return to the people after all?
Under linux the laptop was drawing 50-100watts (which is very high for a laptop), under windows it was drawing from 30-50 watts.
There are several aspects to power managment that many of the OSS kernels fail to take advantage of. 1) they don't turn down they CPU voltage and clock rate, even when the CPU is idle. 2) they don't turn the power off to unused chips and peripherals. 3) sometimes they don't even turn off some devices when the laptop is turned off. Anyone with a Compac Evo laptop has probably seen this. Shutdown your computer while running linux on mains, unplug it so you can take it home and look at the battery charge a few days later and it is down to half charge. Some of the internal devices (like ethernet transcivers) are never even turned off. While wake-on-lan etc. might make sense on desktops, one has to wonder what the folks were thinking when they decided to keep a laptop's ethernet powered even when the laptop might later be needlessly draining the battery.
Now some of this isn't the the fault of the OSS authors. In many cases the chip companies simply never release the information needed to correctly manage the power. That's got to change. Other times, it is simply that nobody cares enough about power usage to get off their butt and write the code. Certainly the amd64 CPU voltage/frequency settings fall into that category for the various BSD's. How many amd64 computers are out there running OSS, idling at 140watts when they could easily be idling at 90watts, a savings of ~30%.
Having switched our ancient house off of fuel oil heating and over to a massive geothermal heat pump system, I just felt like professing my love for it. Heating bill went down, down, down, and running it in reverse gives the old shack air conditioning besides. Yard was ugly for a while, though.
Sounds like he wasn't running cpufreqd. It doesn't exactly install itself.
yes, we've all read of the lost gulf productivity from the hurricanes...but..but.. where are the actual shortages at the retail pump??? You seen 'em? Not seeing them here. You can go get all the gas and diesel you want, at the much inflated price.
There's not only something fishy going on here, there's a whole school of "fishys". Check todays news? Exxon just broke the all time US world record quarterly sales, 100 billion, and quarterly net profit, 9.9 billion. They are taking advantage of the situation and gouging, plain and simple.
And no, I am not a "global free trader", I think that is misnamed and ill advised, so any arguments that "it's the market" mean little to me, because that IS the problem. The market is rigged and fixed, the cartels and middlemen "traders" design the scams, run the scams and bribe off the governments to perpetuate the scams, and brainwash people into accepting it. There is no reason that we as consumers don't have much better autos and cleaner greener and cheaper fuels other than they can make more money the way they are running the scams now. The market is run for the top 1%, not the other 99%. Bass ackwards. It's changing, as the net has enabled more and more people to get more and more information, and bypass the industry FUD.
Alternate energy is a booming market now, because people finally realised that it was out there and viable, defeating three decades of industrial cartel lies.
And finally, because of that, we are seeing significant tech advances. TOO BAD we were forced to waste all those years listening to them doofusses that "'it' wouldn't work", with "it" being anything but petroleum products. We listened to them kinda "free market" jerks for a year as california experienced 'rolling balckouts' and massive price increases for grid juice, that now turns out to have been caused by industrial scamsters cartel collusion and artificial scarcity. Grok cartel, collusion, price fixing? Does that sound "free"? Sure, "free" as in a thief gets your stuff for "free", or a flim flam artist gets your money after running a congame on you. that's the so called 'free market" as it exists in reality, not in quaint academic theory. I'm for FAIR markets, not that scam "free market" crap. That's for crooks and conmen.
It's not totally fixed yet, but at least we, people who follow this "we", are aware that these sorts of shenanigans have been going on. What we are seeing here now with gasoline prices is very similar appearing.
It does if you install ubuntu.
The fact that moderators waste points on rating me down because I happen to enjoy an amusing trolls only shows that there's too many people on Earth that are too fucking stupid to deserve the opportunity to express an opinion, however obliquely.
Fuck you in the butt with a big spiked thing, whoever you are.
There haven't been any new coal generating power plants built in the US in over 20 years. there are proposals for new facilities as well as coal gasification plants, but no construction has begun. The existing power facilities are operating at close to maximum capacity. Any new generation is from the newer and *much* smaller gas-fired plants. Of course, with the price of natural gas increasing now the pace of this new construction has slowed.
US is big exporter of mining EQUIPMENT to China. China has there own production and Shell has a contract to build 10 coal gasification plants in China. So, demand for US coal is NOT being driven by China.
Explain this.
Migrate all your servers to Mac Mini's.
One of the selling points for Sun's Niagara is that a single Niagara processor can do the work of a bunch of single core servers - for about the same amount of power as one single core server.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Eat a dick, whoever moderated me overrated. You're all fucking dipshits.
For a financial data center ("Tier-4" class, 2(N+1)), the cost per kW is $10-15,000 for infrastructure alone. That quickly matches cost of WinTel boxes (although the depreciation cycle is considerably longer).
Energy Consumption works out close to 3x server power consumption, so 1kW of load is equal to 3kW total energy input. That comes close to $2,700 per year in energy costs for 1kW of server power.
This is just the kind of screwed-up priorities that cause companies to lose all competitive edge.
Good (?) accounting tends to highlight grand total costs of small things. Good Lord, we spend $27,000 per year on paper clips! Better control them under lock & key. The lost-opportunity cost of the contract bid missed because somebody was hunting for paperclips does not, of course, appear on and ledger.
Now somebody has summed up the electrical costs of a really large server room and come up with a sum close to a human salary. That always impresses people. (Man is the measure of all things.)
But what is it as a fraction of total operations and capital?
At 11 cents per kilowatt-hour (a common residential cost except in badly-gouged locales; but high for major consumers, at least until lately and those 27% increases) your rule-of-thumb for 7x24 consumption is:
a buck per watt per year.
500-watt average constant consumption from a basic 3u rack server = $500/year. Easy, no?
But that's a pretty serious machine, home machines don't commonly have over 400W power supplies - and certainly don't use the 400W all the time. So we're allowing for air conditioning power in the estimate.
But a serious server starts at $10,000 and you won't get five years out of it, so the capital cost alone is $2000/year and up.
All but the most automated shops surely have a salaried sysadmin (and/or DBA, backup specialty guy...) for every ten machines. And those guys all cost $50,000 dead minimum. So that's another $5,000 per machined per year for care & feeding.
So that's $7000/year, plus power at $500. Maybe skyrocketing to $700 and a full 10% of costs.
And of course I had to assume that the $10,000 included 5 years of vendor support to keep it that low. Never mind insurance, rent on the space, huge UPS's, fire systems, air conditioning (not the power for it, the machinery). In truth, I can hardly imagine power reaching 10% of the operations cost.
Also, I'm taking some place like NCAR as my site: gargantuan computing power at the service of a dozen professors and their retinue of grad students. Totally running their own programs, not million-dollar software packages like SAP on Oracle. In short, the normal "IT" costs of programmers, analysts, support techs, software vendors, don't exist.
Because when they do, they dwarf the cost of running the server room and power dwindles down to being 10% of 10% of your total IT budget. Which in most companies is 5%-9% of total operating expenditure.
Wailing about this cost - which springs out on the accounting spreadsheet because it is up a large percentage from last year - leads to classic penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions.
Perhaps: "we'll use less power if we consolidate a dozen servers down into one big one". A lot of this has been done by IT departments, whom I swear are pining for the days of the mainframe.
But at least where I work, business didn't move off the mainframe because it was such a high cost per compute cycle - often enough we were increasing our total computing costs to go PC and small server. We did it for the flexibility.
And loss of flexibility could cost a business big - for want of a paperclip.
... a long overdue shift in priorities from raw clock speed to efficiency.
/. Normally I just think "what's the point" when I read about people wasting their time defacing classic hardware ranging from Sega Megadrives to Atari 800s and Commodore PETs in order to make novelty PCs. But there was a common element in them: those tiny little Mini ITX boards VIA makes. They not only take very little space but it seemed they also had very modest power requirements.
I have some systems here that are long overdue for an upgrade (4 and 6 years old--only thing that has been updated is hard drive and memory capacity). I do not need to upgrade to increase computational power or even capacity--I do not do gaming or intensive 3d rendering or anything and the computers in question are a couple of linux servers that host a few web sites, email accounts, a modest database server (less than 5 million records in a couple dozen tables of a handful of databases), file server. It is a small-office type setup and it hardly taxes the old hardware.
So why do I have to upgrade? The first reason I had was reliability. The Athlon-powered machine suffered a near-meltdown when the CPU fan failed not long ago and I suspect that there was some hardware damage as the machione started behaving flaky after the incident even though the new fan kept the machine cooler than ever. I disables some unused onboard peripherals in the BIOS (sound, serial ports etc) and the problem went away....hmmm doesn't look good.
However the second reason I have looked at is even more compelling than reliability, and that is POWER CONSUMPTION. Those old Intel and AMD processors run pretty hot and use a lot of power, and as servers they run 24/7/365. I was looking at my latest elecetricity bill and decided to do some calculations. I could realise MORE THAN $50 IN SAVINGS PER YEAR for every reduction of just 100 watts of power consumption. I came across one of those silly PC-modder articles of the nature that sometimes find themselves posted on
I looked into it and found that even the lower-powered fanless boards could replace the web server/file server. Not only would it be compact and quiet, but the entire system would use less power than the CPU chip alone in the current machines (which exceed 60 watts each). If I replace the old machines with EPIA boards I could save in the hundreds per year!
IIRC both AMD and Intel are realising what VIA and Transmeta did years ago--that the clock-speed race is completely pointless now. Not only do both companies invest heavily in mobile technologies--that technology is finding its way into desktops and servers as well. About bloody time I think. It'd be great if this turns into a golf-score style contest of watts-per-flop race.
Will it affect the hosting costs? Hope it wouldn't. When this power hike is expected to come into effect. Any idea how much the hike going to be? thanks.
asoft
It's easier to complain than check your facts, I guess.
The kernel support and userspace software for automated CPU scaling is already here. Ubuntu 5.10 runs powernowd by default, for example. I have a small Mini-ITX fileserver at home running this, and the CPU is currently running at 500MHz (normal maximum is 1GHz). As soon as the load climbs, the CPU speed is adjusted.
See:
http://www.deater.net/john/powernowd.html
Toshiba Satellite (2,6 GHz Celeron, 512 MB, Gentoo Linux) /. /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature)
~ 42 Watt while playing MP3 & reading
~ 76 Watt while doing emerge --sync (updating portage cache) - the temperature goes from 68 to 80 C
(cat
This is for the notebook only, power consumption of 17" LCD and speakers not included (as that's the same on Windows/Linux)
By the way, playing Warcraft 3 on Windows is about +40 Watt compared to surfing the web.
I hear there is a paper clip in your MS Office installation, whether you need it or not...
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
The document (which is very good, by the way) tells you to turn down your hot water heater. This is a bad idea, because the lowered temperature will see your bacteria levels skyrocket in there.
People often suggest turning that down to prevent scalding, but most studies have shown the danger of that is far, far less than the dangers of what could be growing in there.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Our electricity and natural gas prices are going up quite a bit too. I'm hearing a lot that we can expect to pay up to 50% more on energy costs this winter in Toronto.
My gas bill is on an "equalized" plan, which is that they estimate the costs and try to spread it out so that I pay the amount evenly each month over the course of the year. This gets adjusted once per year (in September). Our bill last month was almost 25% higher than the previous amount (which is now the amount I'm expecting to pay for the next year).
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
IIRC, one of the main problems with reversible computing is that it requires insane amounts of memory, since you have to store the state at every point of the calculation. You can't throw away information like we do now (in the form of heat) since you have to remember exactly what calculations were done to be able to reverse it. OK, you might say, slap some big memory chips in there. Not so easy in practice...
On the silicon level, whatever method you are able to use to store the state information (be it capacitors or inductors) will take a certain overhead in energy usage simply to support that reversible process. If you can figure out how to reduce or get rid of that overhead, you'd have companies lining up at your door for your idea! Believe me, they would love to build reversible computers, but no one has discovered a good way of doing it yet. On the silicon level it is probably unrealistic to hope for a working solution. There are some interesting and more exotic ideas involving the 'unzipping' process in DNA, and quantum computing... but not much to show for it yet. Good luck!
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Dudes, get a clue
High oil prices is what the US govt and elite powers want
it means every nation now has to spend MORE US DOLLARS on oil, which means more mideast richfolk have
tonnes of cash, they dont know what to do with... and what do they do? They BUY US TBILLS/BONDS and lower
the US interest rate. If it wasnt for $70 oil, your home lending rates would be 15-30%. China already owns
more than 900b in bonds.
So make oil $70+, suck up 1.3trillion of earths cash, and use 30% of that to fund the US deficit and high debt
and keep rates down to prevent Depression-Mark2 total melt down.
Now how long can this last? who knows....
As they say, the MARKET is more powerfull than any govt in the long run, maybe the elite just want to
delay/save things for 2-5 years, while they cash out and save their asses, and then let the economy fall.
Face it, there is no free market, its all subtly controlled/manipulated, maybe not 100% of it, but >50% of it
. Enough of it to matter.
read financialsense.com and http://www.depression2.tv/
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
SEER is one incredibly botched measurement system, and I believe this statement is a direct cause of it.
The SEER numbers you see are usually about 10 to 15, however SEER is not an apples-to-apples comparison. It's BTUsOfCooling / WattHoursOfElectricityUsed. Half metric, half imperial. Who comes up with this stuff?
To turn BTUsOfCooling / WattHoursOfElectricityUsed into a sensible measurement like Cooling / ElectricityUsed, divide by 3.412.
So, a SEER of 13 becomes an efficiency ratio of 3.80. The reciprocal of 3.80 is .26, much closer to your '30% in practice' comment, so (assuming a SEER of 13) for every watt you bring into your datacenter, you need an extra .26 watts to bring it back out.
By the way, playing Warcraft 3 on Windows is about +40 Watt compared to surfing the web.
The graphics card is a power hog. Try loading a big image in a browser and then scrolling up and down with the scrollbar. You'll probably see the power shoot up while you're scrolling.
Why aren't all large computer facilities located in cold-weather climates to begin with? Cooler summers and colder winters could cut electricity bills substantially. Special outside vents could be setup that allow colder air into the building from outside during the winter.
One question of considerable concern I had was safe long term storage of nuclear waste, the link you provided on Synroc presents a possibility to how the waste may be handled. If nothing else I'd say it's better than simply storing canisters of nonprocessed waste.
FalconShould there be a Law?