HP Looks To Improve Power Management Coordination

tringtring writes "Computer World reports on an HP Labs researcher who foretells a future in which power management features will be built into the processor, memory, server, software and cooling systems. Coordination will be paramount. 'What happens if you turn all these elements on at the same time?' the principal research scientist at HP Labs asks. 'How do I make sure that the system doesn't explode?' This future is the vision of Parthasarathy Ranganathan, the man behind the "No Power Struggles" project at Hewlett-Packard. Power management systems will have to operate holistically, without one component conflicting with another, Ranganathan says. Ranganathan is just one of many researchers at the tech industry's biggest labs researching on how future data centers will handle increasing demands for processing capability and energy efficiency while simplifying IT."

Comments

Amen.

[BronsCon]

My 10 year old HP laptop gets 5hr 45min on a freshly charged battery. The one I'm sitting at right now barely gets 2hr. It's about time they get back to where they were.

Re:Amen.

[dreamchaser]

So you have 10 times the computing power (to be conservative)but over a third the battery life as your old unit. It's called a tradeoff. You can't compare apples to oranges.

Re:Amen.

[BronsCon]

I also have a battery with twice the volume and a chemistry with 4x the energy density of the old laptop's battery. Not to mention that this battery is much newer and in better overall condition. I have 8x the battery capacity and ~3x the CPU power (1600Mhz vs 475Mhz). Factor in the fact that the older laptop has an internal floppy drive as well as DVD drive, where the newer laptop lacks the floppy drive, a hard disk that draws 5 watts more than the one in the newer laptop. I should be seeing nearly thrice the battery life by your logic.

You made the assumption that I had a 4750Mhz CPU, the same peripherals, the same size battery with the same battery chemistry and that similar peripherals use the same amount of power. You also failed to account for power management systems that are present in current laptops, which did not exist 10 years ago. Yet another thing you failed to account for is the supposed increase in efficiency (and decrease in overall power consumption) claimed by PC manufacturers, especially with regard to laptops. You even forgot to account for the age of the battery; 10 years vs. a week-old warranty replacement of a less-than-nine-month-old battery.

I have a battery with 8x the capacity in a system with less hardware and a supposedly more efficient CPU which is only about 3x faster, components which claim lower power consumption and over all better power management than my 10 year old laptop from the same manufacturer. Why am I seeing 1/3 the battery life of the old system rather than the 3x increase logic and mathematics tell me I should be seeing?

Someone, somewhere, is lying and it's not me.

Oh, and... first post! :)

Re:Amen.

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is: what the hell is software doing with all these resources? Why is it always on the shoulders of hardware to improve power specs? I have an idea: how about not requiring billions of processor cycles to support the 12 layers of indirection, redirection, abstraction, obfuscation, 12 megs of NOPs just to change the color of an icon? It is mind-boggling to think about what a modern processor does, I suspect most of it is crud left over from poor software decisions that we must drag around for decades.

I mean a Commodore 64 running GEOS can move a mouse pointer, show icons and have graphical text editing, all on a 1 MHz 64K 8 bit machine. Extrapolating linearly, which I think I am allowed to do, a 33MHz version of a C64 should be easily able to handle higher resolutions, more colors, etc. much much more efficiently and still be competitive as far as basic tasks go. You don't need a dual core 64 bit 2GHz processor to display text or images... yet modern computers still take perceptible time to display a new window, etc... What is the CPU doing? What kind of demented software is this?

Re:Amen.

[SubComdTaco]

All they have to do is look at the work being done on OXs by OLPC, cause that is exactly what they are doing to get their extra long battery life.

Re:Amen.

[robogun]

Wait till you plug in an HP All In One printer. You'll get 15 desktop icons and a bunch of Taskbar quick launch icons. With 30 new high priority processes using half your CPU and all your memory, your battery life will drop to minutes, assuming your machine even meets the OS requirements.

I would not recommend HP to write power mamagement software.

What the hell are HP selling now?

[rde]

"What happens if you turn all these elements on at the same time?" the principal research scientist at HP Labs asks. "How do I make sure that the system doesn't explode?"

That's certainly a worry for me. The last thing I want when I turn on a "processor, memory, server, software and cooling systems" is for the system to explode. Being a dedicated slashdotter, and therefore Linux user, I have little worry that the software will cause any manner of combustion event, but I'd never really considered the dangers of using a processor and memory at the same time. I was thinking of getting more RAM, but given that I'm already running a dual-core, perhaps I should hold off on the extra gig until I hear from HP.

Hint: step 1 is user-control

[Spazmania]

Step 1 is user control for turning up the cooling features. If the user determines that the fans should run faster then the fans should run faster regardless of what the "holisitic" system thinks.

Seriously, this is the single biggest problem with the current HP DL360. The fans turn down to 30% and the memory overheats. A simple BIOS option to set the minimum fan speed to 60% would solve this.

Although it seems bizarre

[zappepcs]

There is something to this. In a data center, if you have a brown-out or full power drop, the strain on power systems to restore power are what can only be described as epic.

When you take a 1400 amp back up system and drop it up and down like a yo-yo in a lightning storm, stress tends to bring out the worst of Murphy's Law. If all the components in a data center were orchestrated, that can be mitigated. It can be mitigated into nearly 'not a worry' status.

Monitors? low priority in most cases. Redundant supplies, in some cases bring them up separately. Cooling fans could be delayed by some seconds depending on usage. It may seem negligent power use, but on startup each system will draw it's max current, and when all do at the same instant, the peak draw can be overwhelming. In fact, computers themselves could bring up hardware in an orchestrated manner to reduce the startup surge.

In addition to this, by adding power management, it's possible to reduce data center power use also. If you monitored temp and turned off fans when not needed, less power used, less heat generated, less cooling needed overall. If all hardware were built in such a way the hardware on a quad nic card that is not used could be powered off after configuration... as an example. Nic cards could be the last thing to be powered up.

This type of design is practically rocket science. If you look at systems that go into space you will see that they count every milliamp of current draw and manage it with precision. Power use is a big concern for space craft.

Automatic is better

[EmbeddedJanitor]

The crap design you mention is jsut that: a crap design. It is possible to make a good automatic design.

How many cars these days have manual chokes, advance/retard, mixture settings etc? None. They are all automatic. Give a user a knob and they will fiddle with it and break the system.

Enterprise users will pay big $ for this

[ejoe_mac]

So when you're purchasing power from the grid and you're metered not on use, but on peak draw, this will save you a LOT of money. Coordinating the power on of a number of systems which draw a lot at power on verses their normal draw (think turning on 100 laser printers all at the same time!).