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

ummmmm

[djupedal]

When someone considers the impact, end-to-end, from carving copper oreout of the ground to throwing the out-of-date server chassis into a furnace, then I'll pay attention...maybe.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...

Re:ummmmm

[kebes]

Your basic point, which is that we need to consider not just operating costs also manufacturing and disposal costs, is a valid one.

However the way you've worded it amounts to "since we can't account for all aspects of impact, I'm not going to worry about any aspect of impact." That's a bit extreme. Surely reducing our power consumption during the operating lifetime of our servers is a step towards greater environmental and fiscal responsibility.

Now, if you can show that the "energy saving" chips generate more pollution during production than the "normal" chips (and that this increase in pollution/energy-use/cost is greater than the savings during the lifetime operation of the chip), that's important. However I doubt that is the case. Thus, to ignore the potential advantages of power-saving measures in the data-center, simply because such measures don't address the orthogonal concerns of production impact, is silly.

Re:ummmmm

[Azghoul]

... except that the Prius promises far more benefit long term than yet another diesel, by way of popularizing the idea that a car can, in fact, be driven by something other than burning dead shit.

Never misunderestimate [:)] the power of technological progress - you gotta start somewhere.

Not really

[WindBourne]

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.

Network Queue Systems

[Colin Smith]

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.

DC power

[rhaig]

everything uses DC internally. Some hardware allows for DC inputs. using DC across the board would greatly reduce cooling costs.

At the cost of massive transmission losses...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.