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First Actual CPU Energy Use Statistics Published
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Oct 12, 2007 12:04 PM
from the stats-for-science dept.
from the stats-for-science dept.
BBCWatcher writes "CNN is reporting that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in August asked server manufacturers to develop 'miles per gallon' ratings for their equipment that would provide accurate assessments of energy efficiency. IBM says it is now providing 'typical usage ratings' for its line of z9 mainframe computers, in addition to previously available maximum power ratings. More than 1,000 z9s around the world started reporting (with the owners' permission) on May 11th their actual installed power and cooling demands, so IBM can publish statistics such as how much energy is required to turn on an additional processor to run multiple Linux virtual servers. The answer? About 20 total watts. 'Over time every vendor is going to be asked to provide typical energy use numbers for their equipment. It's what the EPA wants, and this allows us to move beyond simple performance benchmarking to energy benchmarking.'"
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Move to a Mainframe, Earn Carbon Credits 316 comments
BBCWatcher writes "As Slashdot reported previously, Congress is pushing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop energy efficiency measures for data centers, especially servers. But IBM is impatient: Computerworld notes IBM has signed up Neuwing Energy Ventures, a company trading in energy efficiency certificates, in a first for "green" computing. Now if your company consolidates, say, X86 servers onto an IBM mainframe on top of slashing about 85% off your electric bill each megawatt-hour saved earns one certificate. Then you can sell the certificates in emerging carbon trading markets. IBM's own consolidation project (collapsing 3,900 distributed servers onto 30 mainframes) will net certificates worth between $300K and $1M, depending on carbon's market price. Will ubiquitous carbon trading discourage energy-inefficient, distributed-style infrastructure in favor of highly virtualized and I/O-savvy environments, particularly mainframes?"
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damn lies (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:damn lies (Score:4, Interesting)
Ha! I confess, I cut that post short to try to get the first post (I'd never gotten one before!)
Anyway, the problem with trying to get some "miles per gallon" efficiency rating on computers is defining the "miles". For example, if computer A is 2 times faster and uses 1.5 times the energy compared to computer B at full load, and both computers are run at full load 8 hrs a day (doing some serious number crunching), which computer is more efficient? A is using more power, but is doing twice the amount of "work" of B. So do you measure straight Watts? Watts / MFLOPS? If you use MFLOPS, how do you account for differences in architecture?
Parent
The marine diesel engine industry (Score:4, Informative)
The International Maritime Organization has created a few different cycles- E2 is Constant Speed Main Propulsion, E3 is Propellor law operated propulsion for example. You pick your cycle, run your engine at a variety of loads, then use weighted averaging on those loads to determine what the emissions would be if the engine ran at E2 all the time. Then you can say that for the E2 cycle, the engine puts out so much NOx.
For computers, someone needs to come up with some different computer cycles. There may be several of them- 50% parallelizable with 25% floating point and 75% integer math, 100% parallelizable with 100% floating point math, etc. Different architectures may take dramatically longer to do floating point or non-parallizable workloads. Only then could you run a bunch of tests and really say that under this load the computer uses this much power to do a certain amount of work in a given amount of time.
This is not new or novel stuff. This is similar to how the EPA tests cars. Some cars do highway miles much better than city miles, so they do both and weight the averages.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
While you're at it, account for a more typical load of 10%, account for periods overnight when the machine may be completely idle (for a US-centric web site, for example), etc.
First, everyone has to agree on a series of load metrics which when combined are sufficient to get a good approximation of performance under various types of load (disk-heavy load, CPU-heavy load, etc.). Only then can we really answer the question of how much power a server is going to waste.... :-)
Re:damn lies (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For example... I was recently shopping for home theater projectors and was doing a lot of comparisons between brands. The two most
about time. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Power consumption since mid-80's? (Score:2, Interesting)
Cheers, Securityf
The first one though... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice to get a watt/CPU (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nice to get a watt/CPU (Score:5, Interesting)
While it's a baby step in the right direction, Watts alone as a "benchmark" is meaningless as is Watts/CPU. The VIC-20 likely beat the Z9 back in 1980.
If IBM is serious about server energy consumption, they should publish statistics using the SWaP (Space Watts and Performance) benchmark Sun has been promoting for several years or even "MFLOPS/Watt" or "Page serves/second/Watt" If the Z9 can handle a typical highly threaded webserver load with fewer watts than something like Sun's T2000 Niagara while providing identical performance, IBM shouldn't be afraid to prove it.
Until then, I'll assume it's just another useless benchmark configured specifically to make IBM's products look better than its competitors.
Parent
energy efficiency has been tackled already (Score:3, Funny)
Re:energy efficiency has been tackled already (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Reason To Buy A CPU (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The savings are substantial -- for an average 25,000 square foot data center, clients should be able to achieve 42 percent energy savings. Based on the energy mix in the US, this savings equates to 7,439 tons of carbon emissions saved per year."
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelea [ibm.com]
Re:Reason To Buy A CPU (Score:4, Informative)
For a power supply i got a seasonic 330w S12 (variable speed ballbearing fan).
My computer is entirely fanless except for the stock AMD CPU fan and the Seasonic power supply fan. There's not even a case fan. System and CPU temps seem to be stable around 40C.
My vista "index" is 5.0, with the 5.0 being the lowest number and coming from the CPU.
I wanted a really quiet machine. That meant eliminating fans. That meant buying energy efficient parts (the CPU and the Seasonic PS are both spendier than equivalent parts that don't stick to a tighter energy budget). But the machine _is_ quiet. I've got a kill-a-watt at home that I haven't tried out yet but I hope to see less than 100w of consumption. My old socket 754 machine is 5w sleep, ~100w booted but idle.
I'm also going to be consolidating my "always-on" applications (file serving, possibly BT) onto a Windows home server machine so that i can have my other boxes power-save as much as possible without any real service interruption. Having a few songs here, a few videos there, etc means that I can't keep the majority of machines sleeping the majority of the time (WOL is pretty spotty IMO.. if you configure WOL such that a machine "can" wake, it usually will stay awake from other network noise)
One of the other things i bought with this order was a new UPS. Sticking to a smaller power budget has other interesting effects -- like you can get away with a smaller (and cheaper) UPS to get the same amount of uptime.
Parent
Re:Reason To Buy A CPU (Score:4, Informative)
If you don't do any serious gaming, sticking with the onboard graphics will often reduce power draw significantly. If your mobo doesn't have onboard graphics, picking an inexpensive fanless graphics card will draw the least power.
If you were using onboard graphics, I would expect your system would idle around 55w (+-5w or so). Peak power draw would be less than 100w. With the GPU you're using, I'd guess that it adds add 10-20w at idle and another 50w at peak. It'd be interesting to see what the actual numbers are.
Something people often forget is that a good PSU with active power correction will also significantly reduce the apparently load on a UPS (as well as the grid if you don't have a UPS), not to mention that PSUs with APC are normally significantly more efficient. For example, if your system draws 100w but your PSU has a power factor of
These days it's fairly easy to build a system which idles below 50w as long as you're informed. A bit more research will get you something in the 30-35w idle range if not lowre. I do wonder what you had in your old Socket 754 machine which caused it to idle at 100w. I suspect it had an inefficient PSU and a mid-high end graphics card or wasn't using Cool'n'Quiet. All recent AMD systems I've seen which support Cool'n'Quiet idle at 60w or less unless you have a power sucking GPU.
Parent
How big a fraction? (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems that the computer industry on the whole has become more concerned with energy efficiency over the last few years. I'm glad to see it. As a discipline, computer science is always looking for ways to eke out more efficiency, whether it is at the algorithmic level or at the level of chip manufacture. It seems to be a be a natural fit to extend this thinking further into energy consumption as well.
But I have to wonder, how much of a difference can we make? I t
Useful for consumers as well (Score:2)
Having the additional information would have taken off a good bit of stress, and would help a bit in calculating how much headroom I needed in the PSU to keep the PC itself running smoothly.
Tax benefit (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Tax benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
Giving tax breaks for efficient items penalizes those who conserve the most by not even having the item or by using less. A business that invests money into writing more efficient software and using less servers should not be penalized vis-a-vis a business that invests the money into more efficient servers.
Parent
Performance? (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, just stating the wattage is like stating MPG for a car or the energy usage for a fridge. But every year, car performance stays about the same or gets worse, and the fridge ain't getting more full. There doesn't seem to be a single useful energy metric that can drive informed purchasing decisions.
So how do you deal with CPUs that are twice as powerful in the next product cycle? The wattage will be about the same, but the amount you can get done with that chip will be much higher. It's like next year's car suddenly weighs twice as much, or goes twice as fast, or seats two whole families, while getting the same mileage. You can't even consider it in two tiers like "passenger cars vs truck frames" because you have to deal with 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 performance tiers... they change all the time. How can someone make an informed decision from this?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
miles per gallon? (Score:4, Funny)