Energy Star For Servers Falls Short

tsamsoniw writes "The newly released Energy Star requirements for servers may not prove all too useful for companies shopping for the most energy-efficient machines on the market, InfoWorld reports. For starters, the spec only considers how much power a server consumes when it's idling, rather than gauging energy consumption at various levels of utilization. That's like focusing on how much gas a vehicle consumes at stop lights instead of when it's moving. Also, the spec doesn't care whether a server's processors have one core or multiple cores — even though multi-core servers deliver more work at fewer watts. Though this first version of Energy Star for servers isn't entirely without merit, the EPA needs to refine the spec to make it more meaningful."

Re:Atom

[derGoldstein]

There's also the FAWN project [technologyreview.com] (also on /. [slashdot.org])

Cores-per-die is not a valid metric, not with emerging prototypes that could drastically change how web content is served.

Re:No, it isn't

[derGoldstein]

Regardless of the analogy (they were probably just thinking "dumb it down because we consider the people who read infoworld -- our audience -- to be idiots"), the part about the idling time usually isn't the case. Data centers will often outsource whatever "idle machine time" they have to various institutions, at least if they have any sense.
There are many computing tasks that aren't too time sensitive, and research projects can have considerable leeway in terms of when the final computation is done and the numbers need to be inserted into spreadsheets or whatever.

If there's low traffic during the weekend, get the machines to crunch data for some other purpose, otherwise they're not paying for themselves.

Possibly a better analogy for this would be "machine time scheduling" in a machine shop. You don't let the $200k CNC milling machine just sit there and take up space -- it cost too much. Find *something* for it to do.

By the way, your sig should say: "Every expression is true, for *any* given value of 'true'", IMHO.

Re:Atom

[mangu]

There's also the FAWN project

That's a very interesting link, I had never heard of that. I wonder how it compares with Cuda for parallel numerical computation? The article mention that they are considering using this concept for scientific computation.

Re:Improved Version Coming Next Year

[TooMuchToDo]

You're not the target market. My employer purchases tens of thousands of servers a year. One of our primary considerations is power efficiency. You know, total cost of ownership and all that jazz.