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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."
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.
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.
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!
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.....
Have you ever heard of supply and demand? If we fix oil prices at $25 per barrel, the oil companies will just sell it to China at $70, and we will have NONE. If China convinces Venesula to sell them all their oil, we will see $100 oil very soon.
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.
This is about data centers.
Trust me, the cost of a roomful of PCs running Seti is nothing compared to keeping a 20-ton Liebert running 24x7.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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
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?
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.
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."
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.
Check the power numbers on Intel CPUs - they exceed 100w for all of the enterprise stuff. In a dense rack using blade servers the number of processors can exceed 100 (and there are configurations of around 200). Do the math and you see than this is 10KW. If you look at the specs for a typical set up, the input for this kind of kit is around 20 to 24KW - so around 40-50% of the heat is the CPUs.
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.
I'd love the government to step in and set things straight but I don't see that happening anytime soon. For now we'll either have to bare the pricing or start pushing alternatives which have been available for a good long time now.
Now that "free" idle cpu cycles are getting more expensive to produce, and with newer processors going into power-save modes when idle, I wonder if we'll see a distributed computing project that buys cpu cycles from it's participants. It would probably only make sense for companies to do something like that, but it could still be cheaper than building or renting your own supercomputer.
Uh, this is not true. China's demand is new demand. As demand increases, and supply does not, what happens? Note: This is not a bonus question, it is the entire quiz. Granted, production IS increasing, but I don't think that China's demand is going to fail to outstrip it dramatically as they haul themselves into the modern age.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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
Do you mean, to conserve energy, don't run non-essential services during the summer? Most people can deal with the excess heat generated by computers during the winter (hence a smaller net energy loss.) It is in the summer that you come across problems with wasting energy. Every extra Watt of energy you generate in the summer needs about another Watt (correct me if I'm wrong here) of energy spent to remove it from the building.
Maybe it's just because I'm from Canada, but I only run non-essential services in the winter. It's the only time it doesn't cook me in my apartment. The only major thing you "conserve" by not running your non-essential services in the winter is money on your power bill.
Remember: Conserving energy is more than just using less electricity.
There are two types of people in the world: those who divide people into two types and those who don't.
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.
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
You forget that the US companies such as Exxon are partners with these National Oil Companies in many of these reserves. In fact the Saudi National Oil Company sold "concessions" to produce and market the oil to American firms as recently as 1998 for certain production.
Saudi Arabs, Americans and Oil
By Robert L. Norberg
Human Resources
In 1949, when Harry Snyder was hired to head up the training of Saudi Arabs for Aramco, James Terry Duce, a company executive in New York, told him what was expected:
Your task at Aramco is to train Saudis as quickly and as soundly as possible to operate the Saudi oil industry. Inevitably, the Saudi Arab Government will eventually nationalize the industry. When that occurs, we want the young Saudis to have attained the proficiency that will enable them to operate the oil industry efficiently and with goodwill toward Aramco. Thus they will be serving their country's best interests and will be protecting the interests of our parent companies.1
This vision of the training mission and its ultimate result might have appeared reasonably attainable if recruits were available from local schools, knew a bit of English, and had some exposure to industrial practices. But those conditions did not exist when the concession agreement was signed in 1933, nor in 1949 as the postwar development of Saudi Arabia's petroleum resources gathered momentum. Tom Barger, a geologist who arrived in Arabia in 1937 and rose to board chairman before retiring in 1969, recalled many years later:
[One] aspect that impressed me was the enormous, inordinate poverty of the inhabitants. As I found out later, nearly everybody was hungry most of the time. . . . There's no education, obviously. The few people who could read and write largely had taught themselves. And there were some very learned men, as a matter of fact, among this population, although most of it was illiterate. They had practically no mechanical skills. We had new employees who couldn't get out of a room because they didn't know how to use a doorknob."2
B. C. Nelson, who served Aramco in employee relations for many years, recalled in 1965 what it had been like for Saudis recruited to Aramco in the early years of the enterprise:
Word spread to the desert and townspeople that in exchange for some physical effort the blue-eyed foreigners would give a man a handful of silver! And so they flocked to Aramco's budding oil centers . . . Imagine the effect on a recruit to be plunged into the mechanical age -- none of which fit in with his prior orientation or culture -- with little or nothing in his experience to help him adjust. The most amazing thing about these times in terms of one small facet of an Industrial Relations problem -- absenteeism-was not that, when they were handed their bag of money, they returned to their tribe with their glad tidings, but rather that they ever came back to work. Industrial discipline was practically unknown, so the amazing thing was that there was only a 75 percent turnover in the first few years.3
On-the-job training began on an informal basis in the 1930s and was soon complemented by rudimentary industrial training in classrooms. But without English, Arabic literacy, and basic arithmetic, there was a limit to the progress Saudis could make in job performance and advancement. In 1944, with operations revived after a wartime suspension, the Jabal (meaning "mountain" or "hill") School was opened in Dhahran.
Surely in 1944 no one expected history to remember the humble Jabal School. Yet the little company school endures as a symbol for development -- not for the development of an oil company, but for the development of a generation of very special young men. Many Saudis were introduced to the mystery of letters and numbers at the Jabal School. Among them were future scholars, successful businessmen and powerful executives.4
The Jabal School was the beginning of an ever-evolving, structured program of job-related training and general education that replicated under corpor
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?
Interesting question. Let us consider a simplified universal payroll system and see where this goes. I'll stipulate roughly 200 million US payroll employees and 52 pay periods. Lets say individuals require 200 KiB of storage (historical deductions, contributions, etc. necessary for YTD results,) and generate 1 KiB of storage each period. The necessary software doesn't exist to accommodate the payroll requirements for every conceivable employment situation, but we'll just pretend it does.
You'll need 41 TiB of storage on day one. Each day you'll need to perform 28.5e6 payroll calculations generating 29.2 GiB of new data.
The storage requirements alone are going to blow your hardware budget. It's understood the data will need reliable storage, so a rack of 82 500 GB SATA drives won't do (with a new drive added every 16 days.) Lets factor in 25% storage overhead for (poor) redundancy. We need just over a hundred 500 GB drives. Storage at this scale will inevitably result in SAN or some such technology, so you'll need some storage switches. The storage hardware will consume many times the power of your AMD64.
Data will have to arrive via some network. Payroll is an aggregate calculation of many different forms of detail data. Lets say the time sheets, vacation requests, etc. represent 10 times the volume of the result. You'll need to handle 292 GiB of inbound (we'll assume outbound is negligible) data per day. That's 2 DS1s running at capacity at all times. You'll need redundant switching hardware for this. Also, we're taking for granted that fraction of Internet capacity necessary to move this data; it's not really free, after all.
Computational load is much harder to estimate without an accurate model of typical payroll calculations. I'll use my experience with OLAP consolidations. 2.4GHz Xeon will compute an 8 GiB cube in 45 minutes. This time is mostly (95%) spent in the CPU. Its also far simpler than payroll, consisting mostly of simple aggregates and hash calculations. Lets throw a factor of 3 at this to cover the extra computation necessary for payroll. We'll need 8.2 hours of CPU time per day. That seems quite feasible for an AMD64 CPU.
There is no wiggle room in the above estimates. No backups, no test system, no fail over. In the real world batch computation is highly synchronous, so you need a lot of spare network and compute capacity. You're doing a lot of co-processing here; the CPUs running the SAN switches and routers are all essential to the process, so you can't give all the credit to the AMD64 CPU. The interesting thing is that communications and storage are the real power hogs.
Disclaimer: To call the above 'back of a napkin' is probably flattery.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
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.
How do you know it's fuelled by gouging and speculation? How can you say the price is "wrong"? Define "gouging".
Whatever the cause it is evident that something is wrong with the market. As others have pointed out, the oil companies are reporting overwhelmingly huge profits. In an efficient market, cost of production and selling price converge. Since they are currently hugely divergent, somebody is jiggering the system. Since the USA, and anything to do with oil the world around, is pretty much a corptocracy, chances are the blame lays with the corps.
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
Are you kidding me? I overclock my computer by 10% during the winter and increase the monitor power save timeto 30 minutes (from 10) just to warm my apartment up a little bit more. Given the double cost of natural gas this winter, keeping the area around my computer warm (where I'm sitting most the time anyway) might be more cost efficient.
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
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%.
Yeah, I've done payroll systems, too. You seem to be confusing difficulty of implementation with the speed the calculations could be done once the program's written.
We're talking about a meaningless hypothetical situation. Yeah, if such a program existed, it would certainly save a lot of power. But how much power will be used by all of the development systems, servers, QA environment, staging, etc etc in order to produce the program in the first place? I think you'd lose out in the long run, unless there's a lone genius that can crank out the program in assembly in a week (though in reality it would take probably 20-30 years just to digest all the business rules).
BTW, most large scale payroll systems I know of still run on AS/400's. No java or XML in sight, except for external interfaces.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Well, let's see. In our one measly rack, we have two 20-amp circuits, and we're above 80% continual utilization on both. That's about 4 kilowatts, figure about 3 averaged over a 24-hour period. Over 30 days, 24 hours/day, that's over 2,000 kilowatt-hours. If they're paying 10 cents per kW/h, that's $200 per month in power bills for them.
How much do we pay for the cabinet and extra power circuit? $775. Right there, that's about 25% of the cost. Now, remember that they need to provide the cooling for 4 kilowatts of heat generation - which uses more electricity.
In a few months, we're going to lease another rack - not because we've run out of rack space, but because we've run out of electricity and cooling. The thought of using more electically-efficient chips like Via's offerings sound pretty attractive, but there are drawbacks: First, with as many new dual-CPU machines as we have to throw in every year to keep up with demand, it's going to take an awfully high number of Eden or Nehemiahs. Going from a dual-Opteron to single-CPU nehemiahs, I'd probably need at least 6 Nehemiahs, probably 8. That means that not only do I have to buy 8 times as many CPUs, chassis, and power supplies, I need 8 times as many hard drives, and 8 times as much memory - and considering that each machine uses several gigs of memory for lookup tables and disk cache, that's a looooot of cost.
That being said, I'd really, really, REALLY like to see some ultra-high density Nehemiah-based server equipment. Given the size of the mini-ITX format, you should be able to pack at least 12 - if not 16 - entire systems inside of a 1U chassis.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I don't know what electricity bills cost in the States, but I can tell you that rates in Quebec are also increasing. Hydro Quebec sends a lot of juice down the pike to the US, so increasing demand in the US means increasing demand for Hydro Quebec. In effect, we pay higher rates so that Hydro Quebec can export electricity to the US. Joy.
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.
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.
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.