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Benchmarking Power-Efficient Servers
modapi writes "According to the EPA, data centers — not including Google et al. — are on track to double power consumption in the next five years, to 3% of the US energy budget. That is a lot of expensive power. Can we cut the power requirement? We could, if we had a reliable way to benchmark power consumption across architectures. Which is what JouleSort: A Balanced Energy-Efficiency Benchmark (PDF), by a team from HP and Stanford, tries to do. StorageMojo summarizes the key findings of the paper and contrasts it with the recent Google paper, Power Provisioning for a Warehouse-sized Computer (PDF). The HP/Stanford authors use the benchmark to design a power-efficient server — with a mobile processor and lots of I/O — and to consider the role of software, RAM, and power supplies in power consumption."
When someone considers the impact, end-to-end, from carving copper oreout of the ground to throwing the out-of-date server chassis into a furnace, then I'll pay attention...maybe.
Until then, this is just marketing 101...
I'm hoping the units are going to be kWh/slasdotting.
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I'm not a hardware guy - but in an all hands meeting the other week, we were told that virtualization was going to save us a bunch of money on power. Our data center isn't all that big and they were talking about 2-3 thousand (US$) a month or something like that.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
EPA Official: You've gone mad with power!
Russ Cargill: Of course I've gone mad with power! Have you ever tried going mad without power? It's boring and no one listens to you!
When looking at all the servers in datacenters I often wonder how many servers are not actually needed. I do not mean redundant or due to be decommissioned servers. I mean there are to many dedicated servers. It is a common theme to have every service using a dedicated server. Is there any reason a server can not do more that just DNS? A properly built, configured and maintained server should be able to fill multiple roles thereby reducing space, power and cooling requirements.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
The lifetime costs of the chips are what you can control directly. As it is, the manufacuering of the chip (and even the systems) are going to be relatively close to each in terms of energy. The CPU/GPU is the single largest means of our being able to control energy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"The Singularity" predicts that processing power will continue to increase exponentially for ever. So obviously, electricity generation will also do the same. Not a problem.
Deleted
Have been optimising server resource utilisation for decades.
The real problem is that most I.T. staff are either as dumb as bricks and have no idea how to make use of one or have plenty of profit to burn and just don't care.
Deleted
If we ever run into wide-spread power availability issues. In the event of a natural or economic disaster, perhaps a series of them or we just degenerate into a civil war between political factions. No one ever imagines we could go through a near-collapse and fragmentation similar to the old Soviet Union.
We'd likely have bigger worries than whether we could keep our data centers running but it's an interesting scenario to contemplate. I honestly had no idea data centers in the US consumed that much power.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
everything uses DC internally. Some hardware allows for DC inputs. using DC across the board would greatly reduce cooling costs.
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
According to the EPA, data centers -- not including Google et. al -- are on track to double power consumption in the next five years
Google will just cache the power from the other data centers.
If nothing else, maybe this will spur the design of other relevant energy efficiency benchmarks.
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Seems to me someone left out another viable alternative.... especially since we just had that article last week about IBM consolidating several hundred PCs into a handful of Big Iron boxen...
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
I think a better solution would be for corporations to meter, document and budget power expenditures in the server room. Once costs like this are recognized corporations will be more motivated to do something about it. You can justify the cost of switching to a 12 volt setup if you have the numbers to back it up.
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Two sentences I would highlight from the StorageMojo article:
/., about how Microsoft could become the world's greenest company with a few small changes in code to be more aggressive about using power saving modes by default. Hardware makers have been harping on about power efficiency for ages, driven largely by the mobile computing and gadgetry market. As a result, there are a lot of things that the hardware can do to save power when under-utilized or idle, even in the server market. However, those features are only useful if the software (particularly OS and firmware) takes advantage of them. The more widespread the software, the greater the impact of incremental improvements in power-efficient code. A tiny fraction times GWh of energy is still a large amount. There are whole realms of power efficiency that have yet to be tapped.
1) Developers, the time may not too far away when your code is measured on power efficiency.
2) Software effects will be found significant as well because widely used software affects so many systems.
This reminds me of an article here on
Years ago we heard how PCs were going to be embedded in everything from the dishwasher to the refrigerator, and I was left wondering, "why?"
Perhaps now I know.
It would be nice if I could set my house up on a "power budget", and let my appliances vie for electrical power and load-balance themselves to stay within that budget. If all appliances spoke over the in-house wiring (or perhaps wireless) and could turn themselves off or adjust their power usage that would be awesome.
You could implement something similar to this today with an X10 system or the like, but this is more of an off/on scenario, and is not based on actual power demands.
It would be great if all of my electrical things in my house could get together and say, "OK, guys, we have X amount of electricity to use today between all of us. Let's figure out, based on past usage patterns, who needs to be on and when in order to hit this budget".
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The only place DC power makes sense is large data centers, where AC is converted to DC in only a few places, instead of in each machine.
That's because DC power distribution suffers from massive losses if it's transmitted across any decent distance.
Answer me this : how much power is lost through the use of inefficient programming languages and architectures which only emphasize processor speed, instead of balancing memory, processor and IO ?
Python, Perl and PHP all suffer from one big drawback : when you scale up you need that much extra processor power. One programming language I know (Common Lisp) offers the advantages of them, but can be compiled to near C/C++ speeds. I suppose there are others. Don't come saying that programmers are expensive. It seems that what you gain on programmers, you lose in the cost of your datacenter. I don't know how Java matches here, it probably depends upon the deployment of more recent JIT compilers.
If you see how much a process has to wait on IO, how come there are still no good solutions in providing enough IO bandwidth that the processor can use fully ? (Unless you buy a mainframe or iSeries system that is)
Just asking.
SiCortex
They're more focused on computation than giant racks of storage, but their 2 systems are rated at max 3W/core total power consumption including drives, power supplies, interconnect, etc. I suspect the actual power draw will be much less.
How much storage does a "typical" datacenter have? (I know any answer would have huge variances.) For probably over two million USD or so, you should be able to get their larger system with 8TB of RAM and run their RAM-based Lustre filesystem along with the HD storage. Even with more places getting into petabyte ranges, I suspect 8TB of RAM and 5832 CPU cores would make it fly (16TB on 11,664 cores at $4-5M or so for redundancy). To me, that cost looks like a whole lot less than the facilities construction, cooling, and administration of the typical rows of racks... if it would meet the need.
(not affiliated with them; just a customer looking forward to their products)
Today, a typical data center with 1000 racks, consuming 10MW total power, costs $7M to power and $4-$8M to cool per year . . .
So if there are 1000 racks that consume 10 MW of power, that means each rack consumes 10 W ? That seems a bit low. If you take the $7M power cost and do some division with power at about 7 cents per MW/hour to make the math easier, it comes out to about 33 W per rack, which is still a bit low. At 4 cents per MW/hour ( our local cost ) it comes to about 200 W per rack. That places the total MW of 1000 racks at 200 MW, not 10 MW.Is my math suspect, or some of their numbers ?
I like your style. Wealth and progress.
So, is there some kind of standard for data centers for computing power - some combination of raw processing and data throughput - per megawatt? I mean, is there some magic number that data centers should try to achieve? And if there is, how do you measure that?
-John Mark
Hyperic Community Manager
This was an idea that I had before at the last job, never got a chance to implement it. We had a lot of cluster nodes for computing various things that were business related. There was a queue of work, and they got assigned to nodes if it matched the right criteria. The issue is that we had a few things, like crunching financial data at month/year end which required us to have some database servers that were beefier than others.
So the idea was to have systems re purposed automatically, using something like Oracle Rack 10G. You have a need for more database performance, you take unused nodes from your fluid dynamics processing pool, make them oracle nodes (took about 15-20 minutes to install RHEL 4) and go to town. This works a lot better with things like LDAP servers, web servers, et cetera, but we needed it for Oracle.
So anyways, this would be one way of eliminating unused hardware, being nimble about how what application uses it. This also would be combined with shutting down cluster nodes that are not in use. Boot time is so cheap, why bother keeping them on.
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Sun Microsystems is going to make a killing over the next couple years. Say what you will about "red-shift" and all their other hokey marketese, they definitely got ahead of the curve when it comes to the idea that power, cooling and infrastructure costs and going to become limiting factors on business growth in the coming decades.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
...if ./ and Digg went offline for a week?
On a serious note, since I've got nothing else to do at work (as it's mind-numbingly boring), I was trying to figure out how many electrical plugs I would actually need to live a happy life (note, this is an extreme).
My answer: 2
One for the fridge, the other for a radio. Of course, it would be nice to have ceiling fans too, but those don't require power plugs, just direct wiring. Think about how many things you have plugged in to your house (e.g. those cell phone chargers you forget to unplug, how many clocks do you have in your house?, that entertainment system that never actually gets turned off but switched into standby) and compare that to what your parents went through when they were your age. And yet, somehow they managed without all of these doohickies that we have today.