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

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.