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."

Comments

Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[Hulkster]

I think "crisis" is a bit sensational, but yea, power is a concern and it ain't getting any cheaper. This is certainly not helped by the power consuming (and heat generating) hot chips from Intel. Note that you have to pay for that "twice" since for every BTU they consume in electricity, you have to cool it in a data center. Ironically, Part 1 does not even talk about how the CPU itself is a big issue here ... maybe they'll cover it in the rest of the series. Speaking of which, wouldn't it be better for stuff like this to wait until the series is over before posting on Slashdot?

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.

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[Rei]

I saw a speech recently from the director of NCAR, Tim Killeen. NCAR does advanced climate change modelling. According to his speech, they know pretty much every factor now that has a relevant effect on global climate; their only limitation that they are aware of is processing power and data storage. As such, their computing requirements are growing notably faster than Moore's law.

Their current power bill is 40,000$/mo. At their new facility (you can see a design of it in this document), it will be far more. Most of the building will be for computers and associated equipment; the building is being largely designed for dissipating all of the heat. I recall he said it was to consume about 3 MW, so at 0.8 cents/kWh, that would be about 175k$/mo.

As an aside, it was a really fascinating presentation. They showed *their* model of Katrina (which was presented to the White House as an "experimental product"); it was spot on. Very impressive stuff indeed. At one point I asked him about proposed methods to induce global cooling such as dumping iron into iron-deficient waters. He stated that while he hadn't modelled that, their models already take into account natural mineral influxes and their effects on bacteria populations (and thus, the effects of those bacteria on the environment), so they could model that if they needed to. He also pointed me to some newer Vostok core data :)

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[c0l0]

Believe it or not, but I moved into the apartment from where I'm writing right now last year, and winter's been quite harsh 10 months ago or so here in Austria. I used to heat my ~35m^2 flat with ym Pentium-4-Northwood@3.5GHz-powered PC, and have not figured out how to operate the flat's heating yet... what will turn into an annoying problem soon, cause I swapped the Intel-beast for a low-power AMD box, which is dissipating a whole lot less heat; I'm actually already freezing a little right now :-)

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[GMFTatsujin]

At what point do the heat effects of their computers get folded into the climate simulation parameters themselves?

Energy price predictions

[grqb]

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

Re:Energy price predictions

[NineNine]

I own a retail store. Distributors that used to distribute on their own trucks for free are now charging upwards of $20/trip. This is getting passed on to the consumer. Inflation due to energy prices is quite real. I've been "inflating" prices to compensate for it all day, in fact.

A solution to winter price spikes:

[n3umh]

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.....

Any time soon?

[MirrororriM]

and according to experts and IT pros, those prices aren't going to come down any time soon.

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.

Re:Unctuous

[mc6809e]

Oil still costs about $15 to pump out of the ground,

What a bunch of bullcrap. The cost of pumping oil varies from well to well. Sure, it might cost Saudi Arabian Oil Company $15 per barrel, but if they only release enough oil for half the world's demand, other producers have to fill that supply. It can cost those other suppliers much more to pull oil out of the ground. And that high price is going to lift the market price.

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.

Oh really? So they're just going to tell Saudi Arabia or Venezuala to lower their prices? How are they going to force them to do that? Oh, you mean force American Oil companies. Well here's a clue: American oil companies are bench-warmers in the global oil market. The biggest American company, ExxonMobil, ranks just 16th in the world in total reserves. They control about 2% of the worlds oil. Hell, even Petronas, a Malaysian company, is bigger than America's biggest oil company.

And looking at the table you see that the market is dominated by state-owned, national oil companies like Saudi Arabian Oil Company, and Petroleos de Venezuela. The only way you're going to lower the price they charge for oil is to invade and force them. Otherwise they'll sell their oil to the highest bidder.

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.

So your complaint is that Bush hasn't invaded enough countries yet to lower oil prices. Interesting.

The fact is state-run foreign oil companies set the price for oil. There is very little the government of the USA can do about it aside from rushing in with tanks to take their oil fields. Any kind of price control on this oil would mean it would get sold to someone else at a higher price, like the Chinese, for example.

Leading Oil and Gas Companies Around the World

Rank by 2004 Oil Equivalent Reserves Company Worldwide Liquids Reserves, Million Barrels Worldwide Natural Gas Reserves, Billion Cubic Feet Total Reserves in Oil Equivalent Barrels, Million Barrels
1 Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Arabia) 2,3 259,400 234,500 299,485
2 National Iranian Oil Company (Iran) 2,3 125,800 940,000 286,484
3 Qatar General Petroleum Corporation (Qatar) 3 15,207 910,000 170,763
4 Gazprom (Russia) 0 988,892 169,041
5 Iraq National Oil Company (Iraq) 2,3 115,000 110,000 133,803
6 Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (UAE) 3 92,200 196,100 125,721
7 Petroleos de Venezuela.S.A. (Venezuela) 3 78,998 149,891 104,620
8 Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (Kuwait) 3 99,000 55 99,009
9 Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (Nigeria) 2,3 35,255 176,000 65,340
10 National Oil Company (Libya) 2,3 39,000 52,000 47,889
11 Sonatrach (Algeria) 2,3 11,800 160,500 39,236
12 OAO Lukoil (Russia) 23,215 39,089 29,897
13 Petronas (Malaysia) 5,290 85,200 19,854
14 PetroChina Co. Ltd. (China) 10,941 44,554 18,557
15 Petroleos Mexicanos (Mexico) 14,803 14,807 17,334
16 ExxonMobil Corporation (United States) 8,395 31,843 13,838
17 BP Corporation (United Kingdom) 5,775 46,650 13,729
18 Egyptian General Petroleum Corp. (Egypt) 2 3,700 58,500 13,700
19 OAO Yukos (Russia) 10,950 7,800 12,283
20 Petroleo Brasilerio S.A. (Brazil) 2 9,945 11,247 11,868

Virtual Servers

[LiquidAvatar]

Recently, I've been working on virtualizing data centers. One of our big selling points is the ongoing power costs associated with a large data-center. If you're running 900 logical servers on 25 physical boxes, you're saving a LOT of energy (both in powering the systems and cooling the center).

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.

Reversible Computing does not produce heat.

[shapr]

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.