Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.....
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."
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
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.
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