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Companies Waste $2.8 Billion Per Year Powering Unused PCs
snydeq writes "Unused PCs — computers that are powered on but not in use — are expected to emit approximately 20 million tons of CO2 this year, roughly equivalent to the impact of 4 million cars, according to report by 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy. All told, US organizations will waste $2.8 billion to power 108 million unused machines this year. The notion that power used turning on PCs negates any benefits of turning them off has been discussed recently as one of five PC power myths. By turning off unused machines and practicing proper PC power management, companies stand to save more than $36 per desktop PC per year."
Not so good with Vista though, as the warning dialog appears in another desktop. Part of that secure desktop thingy for UAC prompts and the like. You get a program appear in the taskbar but unless you actually notice it and click on it you'll never know your PC is about to shut down.
Your basic point is correct though, but I think a lot of organisations prefer to buy stuff than have in-house staff capable of writing even simple scripts like this. Presumably it's for the same reason they'd rather pay some consulting company loads of money to build an SOE we could've done ourselves: if it's outsourced to a high-priced company, it must be better!
I didn't RTFA, but does the product they're suggesting produce pie charts? That's probably the answer.
That's why I use hibernation. It takes one minute to shutdown and another to startup.
The computers are not being left *solely* for the purposes of the cluster. The policy of the university admins is to leave them overnight for updates, and anyway the users don't like to turn them off (so they don't have to wait for the computer to boot up in the morning). Therefore we are utilising what sits there idle anyway. Furthermore, anyway you don't take into account the overhead of buying a supercomputer / cluster with 1000+ nodes in the first place -- and we are utilising what has already been payed for (both in terms of money from the university and in terms of energy used / CO2 emission that took to produce the units). Finally, buying a supercomputer / cluster is, due to the necessary bureaucracy involved in expensive investments, a major pain in the ass and also a system-administrative effort.
Of course, this solution cannot replace a proper cluster -- I have already outlined why, and also I agree with you in puncto efficiency. But if you have a bunch of PCs sitting around idle at night, and need calculations -- this may be a cheap and quick solution.
j.
1. paragraph tags make posts as long as yours easier to read, for future note
2.Your essential point is it's more efficient to use one presumably NUMA supercomputer to complete a task, which may or may not be the case depending on the supercomputer and the task given, but the point is.. they don't have a supercomputer, and likely don't have the funding for one.
Using their spare pc's at night in a clustered environment would be one of the most cost-efficient things they could do in so far as hardware purchasing, considering they already need and have the pc's setup in the right configuration
we don't all have a 128-cpu onyx 3800 gargantuan tower sitting in our closets for this kind of computing, we do tend to have at least a few relatively fast desktops available which would otherwise be off or idling.
28.8 billion kWh/year is more than enough to 'change the power plants operating conditions'. A 125 MWe unit (the output of one generator of a nearby power station) delivers about 1 billion kWh/y, so shutting down all PCs at night would make a significant dent in the base load.
I assembled an AMD Athlon / Athlon ASUS A7N8X and a Pentium 4 / MSI motherboard powered PCs at about the same time more than 5 years ago and these computers are being powered on and off almost everyday. They still work.
Newer PC components especially the motherboard usually still have juice in them even though you power them off. The CPUs and graphics card even when powered on will still experience heat cycles ranging from just above room temp when idle and depending on the efficacy of the cooling system, to 60 C (for CPUs) or 90 C (for high end graphics cards) when playing games.
Why "5 minutes"? I would guess that if you turn off PCs after the workday and don't turn them back on until the next morning you save more like 15 to 16 hours of run time.
That's 960 minutes per day x 230 work days = 220,800 minutes. Or 3,680 hours per desktop per year. That's not counting in the 48 hours every weekend (52) which equals an additional 2496 hours, plus however many holiday days at another 24 hours each. If there are seven for whatever business, that's another 168 hours. And if the worker takes off two weeks each year, that's an additional 336 hours.
Grand total is 6,680 hours of wasted run time as an estimate.
For the people who run the fancy screensavers, the power used is fairly large. A blank screen is the best. That lets the monitor go into low power.