[Gllug] Cheap rackmount servers

[John Hearns]

On 24 August 2010 09:30, Lucian <lucian at lastdot.org> wrote:
>>
>> I hoped this would save me some power, but my power bill fell by *three
>> quarters*
>
> That's a wow! Thanks for sharing, didn't imagine the difference in
> power usage is so massive.
>

In the HPC world, there is a lot of hot air at the moment (pun
intended) about lifetime power usage.
I don't have the figures to hand, but a large proportion of a clusters
lifetime costs are power and cooling.
Historically, this has been taken care of by the facilities people in
your cmapus or business - however these days
people are taking a closer look at it.

There is a lot of noise being made about using GPUs to get more
horsrsepower per watt - all very interesting stuff.

There are of course the batch schedulers which will power off idle
machines when they're not being used, but a bit more interestingy
there was an article this week about Purdue university using the
cpufrequency drivers in Linux to throttle down CPUs when server rooms
start getting hot (I mean actively doing this, not at the BIOS level).

And finally a fresh acronym - MAID. Power down those disks when they
are not being accessed:
http://www.sgi.com/products/storage/maid/
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