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."

Comments

Units?

[niceone]

I'm hoping the units are going to be kWh/slasdotting.

a la simpsons

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Don't worry

[Colin Smith]

"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.

Re:The case for Smart Appliances

[RAMMS EIN]

``You could implement something similar to this today with an X10 system or the like...''

Dude, we've been using X11 for some time now! X10 has been obsolete for almost exactly 20 years...