Price of Power in a Data Center

mstansberry writes "Much like the rest of the country, IT is facing an energy crisis. The utilities are bracing companies for price spikes this winter and according to experts and IT pros, those prices aren't going to come down any time soon. This is thefirst article in a four-part series investigating the impact of energy issues on IT."

Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[Hulkster]

I think "crisis" is a bit sensational, but yea, power is a concern and it ain't getting any cheaper. This is certainly not helped by the power consuming (and heat generating) hot chips from Intel. Note that you have to pay for that "twice" since for every BTU they consume in electricity, you have to cool it in a data center. Ironically, Part 1 does not even talk about how the CPU itself is a big issue here ... maybe they'll cover it in the rest of the series. Speaking of which, wouldn't it be better for stuff like this to wait until the series is over before posting on Slashdot?

P.S. The submitter has a nice fishing web site and is holding about a 12" trout on his main page. Nice catch ... but I'd recommend he go on a fishing charter in Seward Alaska [komar.org] if he wants to catch some mongo fish. This trip was a major slayfest and my brother was Captain Crudd [komar.org] who knows how to fish with a beer in his hand.

Yeah, but at least you won't have to

[Tavor]

Run the heat in the winter with Intel chips! Just do batch-processing, or some intense rendering work.

Re:Yeah, but at least you won't have to

[webzone]

So true. Last year my house heating system broke and I was able to heat my room just by using my Intel Pentium 4.

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The cooling expense isn't as bad as the heating. I think the theoretical efficiency of cooling is 10% of the heat to be removed, where it would take 100W to remove 1000W of heat. In practice, it is about 30%, so it's not as bad as some people think.

One thing I am skeptical of is the need to cool to like 60 degrees F that I've heard (and felt in one room). Good cooling is nice, but I know one guy that says they don't ever see problems until the temperature is above 80F, so businesses can save a lot by not being so freaking cold.

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[demigod]

One thing I am skeptical of is the need to cool to like 60 degrees F that I've heard (and felt in one room). Good cooling is nice, but I know one guy that says they don't ever see problems until the temperature is above 80F, so businesses can save a lot by not being so freaking cold.

I always considered that as buffer for when you loose one of the AC units. That way if it takes all day to get it fixed, your only up to 80F and still OK.

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[Red Flayer]

I always considered that as buffer for when you loose one of the AC units. That way if it takes all day to get it fixed, your only up to 80F and still OK.

Or, have a redundant AC unit that only kicks in when temp > 75. That way, you're not paying to keep it at 60, and you're covered if you lose a unit.

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[Tiger4]

That depends on the room and the equipment. A single small box ins a large room might take all day, or all week to heat it up to 80F. On the other hand, a lot of boxes in a small room might jump to 80F within minutes of losing the cooling. There is no substitute for good engineering. Do the calcs and set it up right.

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[Trogre]

I believe it's not so much a high temperature that affects electronic equipment, but fluctuations in temperature.

If your PCB traces are expanding and contracting between say 20C at night and 40C during the day you're going to get fatigue. It's also not so good for mechanisms inside hard disk drives.

So the HVAC guy at the local television studio tells me anyway.

Re:Degrees mean time

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The problem with that explaination is this person said that it takes months of 80F before things start misbehaving.

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[Rei]

I saw a speech recently from the director of NCAR, Tim Killeen. NCAR does advanced climate change modelling. According to his speech, they know pretty much every factor now that has a relevant effect on global climate; their only limitation that they are aware of is processing power and data storage. As such, their computing requirements are growing notably faster than Moore's law.

Their current power bill is 40,000$/mo. At their new facility (you can see a design of it in this document [ucar.edu]), it will be far more. Most of the building will be for computers and associated equipment; the building is being largely designed for dissipating all of the heat. I recall he said it was to consume about 3 MW, so at 0.8 cents/kWh, that would be about 175k$/mo.

As an aside, it was a really fascinating presentation. They showed *their* model of Katrina (which was presented to the White House as an "experimental product"); it was spot on. Very impressive stuff indeed. At one point I asked him about proposed methods to induce global cooling such as dumping iron into iron-deficient waters. He stated that while he hadn't modelled that, their models already take into account natural mineral influxes and their effects on bacteria populations (and thus, the effects of those bacteria on the environment), so they could model that if they needed to. He also pointed me to some newer Vostok core data :)

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[GMFTatsujin]

At what point do the heat effects of their computers get folded into the climate simulation parameters themselves?

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[Jeff DeMaagd]

At what point do the heat effects of their computers get folded into the climate simulation parameters themselves?

It probably isn't a big enough factor yet. Keep in mind that one car outputs nearly 10x as much heat energy as a desktop PC.

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[Rei]

Given that every bit of data that they've gathered so far fits into its predictions from the previous data within the range that they would expect it to hold up over given the resolution, for the past century, I'd say that forecasting global trends for another thirty years is well within their range.

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[dattaway]

I was reading the rate chart of Missouri's commercial pricing for electricity: 2 to 3 cents per kilowatt hour. Not a bad deal, but you have to use a lot.

My last company made copper wire and had a "surplus energy" deal, where they paid a fixed rate of $10,000 a month for unlimited useage. The only catch was we had to fire up the peaking generator when the city ran out of power or we would face big fines.

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[haruchai]

Won't those same bacteria greatly increase the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere?

Re:Hot Intel chips are big contributor

[c0l0]

Believe it or not, but I moved into the apartment from where I'm writing right now last year, and winter's been quite harsh 10 months ago or so here in Austria. I used to heat my ~35m^2 flat with ym Pentium-4-Northwood@3.5GHz-powered PC, and have not figured out how to operate the flat's heating yet... what will turn into an annoying problem soon, cause I swapped the Intel-beast for a low-power AMD box, which is dissipating a whole lot less heat; I'm actually already freezing a little right now :-)

Subtreshold leakage

[Spy der Mann]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subthreshold_leakage [wikipedia.org]

"Subthreshold leakage is the current that flows from the drain to source of a MOSFET when the transistor is supposed to be off.

In the past the subthreshold leakage of transistors has been very small, but as transistors have been scaled down, subthreshold leakage can compose nearly 50% of total power consumption."

Perhaps the government should have imposed restrictions on the energy consumption of CPUs earlier. All we've done is feeding the CPU's with more powe

hydrogen fuel

[falconwolf]

People cite Hydrogen as a source but most the available Hydrogen production is a byproduct of fossil fuel refining

Actually Iceland is doing quite well in working with hydrogen, "Iceland launches energy revolution" [bbc.co.uk]. However Iceland has a big advantage over other countries, they have an abundance of geothermal energy they can use to generate hydrogen from water.

Falcon

And virtualization may be the answer

[gtrubetskoy]

We have a page [openhosting.com] on our site with some calculations on how much energy is being saved because we're using Linux VServer and why dedicated servers are not environmentally-friendly (at least not with the current technology - this may change). The numbers are probably off a bit, but they give you some idea.

Also the street price for a 20A circuit in a datacenter is $200-$300, while the cost of a megabit is $100 or less. So a rack of servers that requires two power circuits and pushes 3Mbps (not an unusual scenario) costs twice as much in power than in bandwidth.

And here's another article [eweek.com] on this issue. And another [geek.com].

Re: Linux and power management

[grqb]

I bought myself a watt meter to measure the power of some of my home electronics. So I tested my friend's laptop, it was a Dell, 15 inch monitor P4. Under linux the laptop was drawing 50-100watts (which is very high for a laptop), under windows it was drawing from 30-50 watts. Linux on desktops has the same power management as windows on desktops though.

Re: Linux and power management

[wmshub]

It sounds like Linux was running the laptop at a higher clock rate. Many laptops have a configurable clock rate, and will turn the rate down when power savings are needed (for example, when AC power disappears and the laptop switches to battery power).

A little fiddling with the power controls of Linux would probably get it to the same power consumption as Windows. While you measured something real, it's probably a configuration issue more than a builtin Linux vs. Windows difference.

Re:And virtualization may be the answer

[Jeffrey Baker]

If you're drawing 20A and only serving up 3 megabits, you're doing something seriously wrong.

SpeedStep

[tepples]

The biggest help would be a power-saving feature for the CPUs that when idle they go into a sort of sleep mode and turn off some parts to save power, but I don't recall ever seeing this option on anything but Disk Drives.

It's already here. Once all processes on a system are blocking (waiting for something else to happen), the kernel normally executes a HLT (halt) instruction that waits for the next interrupt. Intel processors have reduced power consumption when executing HLT for as long as I can remembe

Energy price predictions

[grqb]

Energy prices are going to hurt everybody.

From here: [thewatt.com]
"EIA expects energy expenditures will be 18% higher this winter compared to last winter, which will be 8.3% of the annual gross domestic product, a record since 1987 when it was 8.4%."

And for those of you who want to find a way to save energy: Here's 60 Tips To Save Energy This Winter [thewatt.com]

Re:Energy price predictions

[NineNine]

I own a retail store. Distributors that used to distribute on their own trucks for free are now charging upwards of $20/trip. This is getting passed on to the consumer. Inflation due to energy prices is quite real. I've been "inflating" prices to compensate for it all day, in fact.

Solution?

[exi1ed0ne]

Pedal faster!!

Moore's law?

[ChrisGilliard]

"It's the other side of Moore's Law," Sneider said. "As the cost of [buying] these machines decreases, the cost of powering and cooling them increases."

I don't agree with this. How power efficient was Eniac? Also, my laptop lasts much longer the one I had a few years back. I think we're making progress on the power front, but the demand for computing power is attracting more and more dollars, the power cost is largely insignificant with regards to the return on investment.

Re:Moore's law?

[Spy der Mann]

I don't agree with this. How power efficient was Eniac?

Before, or after debugging [wikipedia.org]? :P

Re:Moore's law?

[GenKreton]

How can you apply Moore's law to a vacuum tube driven computer? I'm fairly certain his law only applied to transistor based computers.

I blame software bloat

[irritating environme]

How much power loss is due to ludicrous numbers of layers of processing that go on in modern OSes and applications?

Time for the OS vendors to realize that smaller, efficient code footprints will save money in real world terms.

Then again, I code in java for a living (Ducks)

Coal Accounts for 55% of Generated Electricity

[Black-Man]

And the cost of extracting a ton of coal hasn't changed much from 1995 to 2005. But it shows what a sham commodity trading is - the price of a ton of coal (because it is 'energy' related) is traded relative to the price of a barrel of oil or the cost of a cfu of natural gas.

All this does is further underline the boom/bust cycles of the energy business and how it negatively affects the economy.

Re:Coal Accounts for 55% of Generated Electricity

[pete6677]

When demand increases, price will increase regardless of supply cost. Commodity trading isn't a sham, it's just the way the economy works. If oil and coal were mandated to be sold at a constant price regardless of demand, the supply would run out quickly as people would have no incentive to conserve or to explore for new sources.

This is A Good Thing

[davidwr]

Capitalism is all about supply and demand and the cost of buying A vs B vs doing without.

A barrel of oil may cost $x to pump out of the ground, deliver, process, and burn and coal may cost a fraction of that for the same energy-equivalent.

But it doesn't matter. As long as the demand at either of those prices exceeds supply, the open-market price of both will be about the same and will be higher than the "production" costs.

When the demand is between the two "production costs" that one will be heavily favore

First of many?

[BrianGa]

This is thefirst article in a four-part series investigating the impact of energy issues on IT.

Does this mean three slashdot dupes forthcoming?

A solution to winter price spikes:

[n3umh]

Materials needed: Fans. Flexible duct. Duct tape (of course).
Procedure: Place fans in datacenter. Tape duct to fans. Route duct to office spaces.
Results: Save money on heating and cooling bills.....

Energy is costing more in all areas

[saskboy]

Just on the cusp of hydrogen fuel cell techonology becoming available, we're about to be hit hard with spikes in both gas and electricity. The SK crown corporation SaskEnergy asked the rate review panel for a 41% increase, but the review panel recommended "only" 27%. Auto gas prices have soared as high as $1.20/litre but have settled back at about a $1 CDN. Natural gas though is what scares Canadians, since most heat their homes with either that or electricity.

Sask Power is running advertising imploring

Re:Energy is costing more in all areas

[strider3700]

Here's a cut and paste from a different forum where I was measuring my electric usage trying to track down why my bill was so high.

Initial measurements of the PC are interesting

the monitor draws 3 watts when turned off.
it draws 60 watts when turned on and in text mode
it draws 88 watts when in graphical mode.
effectively the monitor is turned off for 17 hours a day and is in graphical the remainder so thats
0.667 kwh/day or about 4 cents. this is 20 kwh/month or $1.2/month

The cable modem draws 13 watts when on

It's not the increase, it's the density

[pcguru19]

HP just came out with multicore half-height blades. Their latest requirements are 30 amp, three phase power per PDU for a blade rack, with 4 pdus/rack for redundancy. That's enough power service to cover 3 modern 3000 square foot homes when you factor the energy back to 240 volts.

Getting the power to something this silly isn't the pain. COOLING something that consumes 14KW in a 4 square foot space is the challenge anyone in data center management faces. Both HP and IBM have come out with the "innovation

Re:It's not the increase, it's the density

[Red Flayer]

"It's cheaper to just buy or build more traditional raised floor space and run good old fashioned 6, 4, or 2u servers than to cool a bunch of blade racks."

Unless you're in Manhattan. Or Boston. Or LA. Or Miami. Etc.

Re:It's not the increase, it's the density

[Red Flayer]

Looked into it, not cost-effective for my company. For bigger ops, definitely.

Re:It's not the increase, it's the density

[Mr. Sketch]

Both HP and IBM have come out with the "innovation" of heat exchangers that run off your chilled water loop. Some of us have been there and done that and don't want to try it again.

So what's wrong with that option? It seems like water cooling would be the next logical step.

Heat

[suitti]

Much of the energy used is for air conditioning. One might think that this would be easy for data centers in Michigan, but I've worked for places that heat the building and air condition the data center in January. One place had the data center a/c die, and a box fan in a window allowed everything to run. A box fan has to be cheaper to run than a/c. So what we might see is smarter environmental control. At least in the winter, it makes sense to run outside air in, and use the waste heat to heat the res

Re:Heat

[James McP]

Unfortunately, you can't reliably use outside air. While moisture is not typically a factor during winter, pollution is. Many data centers have particulate sensors in their fire system which will go crazy if a bus goes by. And it just dirties up the place, possibly voiding the customer's contracts.

Second, you need the pressurized cooling system. Yeah, your window AC may keep the room at 60F but if the cabinets are expecting cool air to be pumped up through the floor to be vented out the top you can writ

It's about time & apples to oranges

[Red Flayer]

FTA:"Historically, I haven't managed the electric bill. But now we're aware and interested in it," Doherty said. "If I told my boss that my staff wanted a 27% increase [in pay], I'd be downstairs on the carpet."

First, it's good that he's paying attention to the electric bill now. But he should have been paying attention to it in the past (last year saw a spike in prces, too). TCO and all that. Of course, electricity may be negligible compared to other costs, depending on their setup.

Second, it's hig

One question

[Spy der Mann]

Shouldn't there be an initiative to certify computer systems as "low energy", i.e. using low power processors, come with LCD monitors, etc?

Just as the state of Massachusetts chose to use F/OSS to save in office software, why not asking government offices to replace CRT's with LCD monitors?

Re:One question

[Wesley Felter]

It's called Energy Star, but it doesn't (yet) apply to servers.

Re:One question

[ad0gg]

Server can't exactly hibernate when there's limited activity. Last thing i want is my server shutting down. At my last job, we never brought down our solaris boxes because we were always afraid they wouldn't boot up again. 3 years uptime on them.

Re:One question

[Wesley Felter]

I agree. Obviously an Energy Star program for servers should concentrate on active power, not sleep modes.

Re:One question

[doormat]

My company is a quasi-governmental agency. We actually have been pushing out most of our CRTs in favor of LCDs, especially in departments with 20"+ monitors (engineering, etc).

20" CRT: 180W
20" LCD: 60W

20" CRT cost: $400
20" LCD cost: $700

At 8c/kWH, for a 10 hr day, it saves 9.6c/day. So to pay back the $300 it'll take 3,125 days. At 250 working days/yr, thats over 12 years to pay back the cost.

In other words, people like to act all "green" but its just an excuse to get the new toys. The monitor probably wont

Not new

[JonN]

This isn't really a new problem, as you can see from this article [infoworld.com] dated January 5, 2001. From the article: Amazingly, a large hosted-server operation can average the same power usage as a steel manufacturing plant.

I didn't see anyone....

[zappepcs]

mention that much of the power loss and heat generation is due to thousands of power supplies in each data center. If data center racked computers used DC power, the power conversion takes place in one area, and only heat generated by power usage is generated in the data center. This reduces power losses due to multiple AC/DC conversions, as well as the heat generated in those conversions. Less heat means less AirCon is needed, so less power there too. This is such a simple thing to do as well. Most huge te

Re:I didn't see anyone....

[nixer]

Check the power numbers on Intel CPUs - they exceed 100w for all of the enterprise stuff. In a dense rack using blade servers the number of processors can exceed 100 (and there are configurations of around 200). Do the math and you see than this is 10KW. If you look at the specs for a typical set up, the input for this kind of kit is around 20 to 24KW - so around 40-50% of the heat is the CPUs.

Re:I didn't see anyone....

[wmshub]

Be very careful when you talk about reducing the number of power supplies. DC current has much higher losses in the wire since it is much lower voltage (thus higher current for the same power), so if consolidating the power supplies lead to having long DC cables running around your machine room, you'll end up adding to head and wasted power instead of reducing it.

In addition, computer motherboards need pretty clean DC power. Longer cables, and more devices connected to them, will lead to less accuracy in th

Liquid Crystal Display, not Light Emitting Diode.

[saskboy]

I made a typo a few minutes ago and said "LDC", but LED is the wrong technology. It's the kind of display used in clock radios with red blocky displays, if you aren't sure about the difference.

My power company is advertising a power savings of 66% by switching to an LCD from CRT montior. And they are telling people that a screen saver does not power down a CRT so they are still paying for power while it's on.

Re:I didn't see anyone....

[drinkypoo]

Power supplies generate very little heat compared to the rest of the system and the impedance issues are much smaller with AC than with DC, meaning you can use smaller, lighter wire. also, I think you meant LCD, not LED displays. LED displays aren't here yet :)

Re:I didn't see anyone....

[timeOday]

Your observation about power supplies is a good one. Are there any safety issues with DC? Can you recommend a centralized DC power source that could be used for, say, a cluster of 100 PCs? Ideally it would come with wiring harnesses for cpu mainboards and hard drives. Also it would be nice if it the centralized converter could be placed outdoors.

Any time soon?

[MirrororriM]

and according to experts and IT pros, those prices aren't going to come down any time soon.

Let's be realistic, they won't come down...ever. If they can get another 20% (example) out of you this year, do you think they're going to drop it 20% next year after the "crisis"? 10% even? No way. Just like any other energy business that is at a near-monopoly level (gasoline), they can raise it whenever they feel like it and blame it on whatever they want. What are you going to do, go to the competition? In the area I live in (Midland, Michigan) and the surrounding cities (Saginaw, Bay City, Flint, etc) we get ONE choice for gas and electricity - Consumer's Energy. That's it. You don't like their service or prices? Tough shit. You're stuck. There have been "alternative companies" in the past, but all they do is resell energy for Consumers Energy - it's all going through the same pipes and wires.

It sucks, but that's the way it is.

Blame XML and Java

[fuzzy12345]

I've been in the coding game a long time, and a lot of the new technologies in the last few years are just insanely wasteful of computer power. Computers are, of course, supposed to releive humans of drudgery, and this includes programmers just as much as the clerk/minions that are our end-users.

Nonetheless, having the computer repetitively recompute the exact same answers (parse that huge XML config file! JIT-compile that Java app, AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN!) is an exercise in keeping your hardware vendor

Re:Blame XML and Java

[TopSpin]

Who among us doubts that one AMD64 with a few gigs of RAM could, if programmed properly, calculate the payroll for the entire USA every night?

Interesting question. Let us consider a simplified universal payroll system and see where this goes. I'll stipulate roughly 200 million US payroll employees and 52 pay periods. Lets say individuals require 200 KiB of storage (historical deductions, contributions, etc. necessary for YTD results,) and generate 1 KiB of storage each period. The necessary software doe

Re:Blame XML and Java

[CausticPuppy]

Yeah, I've done payroll systems, too. You seem to be confusing difficulty of implementation with the speed the calculations could be done once the program's written.

We're talking about a meaningless hypothetical situation. Yeah, if such a program existed, it would certainly save a lot of power. But how much power will be used by all of the development systems, servers, QA environment, staging, etc etc in order to produce the program in the first place? I think you'd lose out in the long run, unless there

Well DUh!!

[jdehnert]

Hmm, I submitted a question about low power severs for the home just yesterday (No Yea/Neigh just yet), so I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one looking at this.

If I look at my own guilty fact sheet, I can see that I'm guilty of the following...

1. Getting high powered servers all of the time.
2. Not consolidating services enough.
3. Not encouraging enough of an emphasis on power consumption.

On the plus side, I have converted to LCD's whenever I nave needed to replace a monitor. It's a start, but a small one.

Sin

Public vs. Private utilities-Which is cheaper?

[Safe Sex Goddess]

There are a couple of interesting articles at PBS.ORG on this. There is one about private vs. public utility companies [pbs.org].

My own personal opinion is that this is something we've brought upon ourselves. Both citizens and corporations who are not in the electricity business.

I've never understood why some industries allow things to happen that cause themselves to suffer while a small set of industries make enormous profit.

Solar power baby

[dindi]

As some predicted the arab peninsula being covered in solar panels for the time we are completely out of oil, I would make a note on solar power hosting as a sooner or nearer future.

I can imagine a huge installation in the middle of the desert running all the it buried below ground level in the cold, using minimum cooling energy, one level up, the staff and offices, using natural light channeled in thru tricky optics, airconditioned in natural ways and using solar power....

OK, I am an idiot, but It would j

Power consumption in the US

[fejikso]

As an international student currently living in the US, it is quite shocking to see how Americans waste electric power. It is simply not logical why people have to bring sweaters to be comfortable during the scorching summer (because the thermostat is set too low) whereas in winter, buildings become furnaces.

I won't even get started on the obscene generation of trash.

Hopefully these crises well force Americans to find ways of making themselves more efficient.

Re:Power consumption in the US

[Sir_Eptishous]

As a US citizen, I agree completely, but you must understand the cultural forces at work here.

Since the mid-80's, when energy conservation/innovation became passe, and something to be ridiculed like an 8-track tape or bell bottom jeans, the American marketing and advertising paradigm has increasingly encouraged waste and consumption. Since the 90's, when the explosion of consumer electronics really took off, American consumers have been on a binge of gadgetry, all of which require electricity. Yes, I k

Interns

[nurb432]

Hey, we all have interns dont we? Give them a exercycle with a generator attached.. Problem solved.

Virtual Servers

[LiquidAvatar]

Recently, I've been working on virtualizing [vmware.com] data centers. One of our big selling points is the ongoing power costs associated with a large data-center. If you're running 900 logical servers on 25 physical boxes, you're saving a LOT of energy (both in powering the systems and cooling the center).

More and more players are entering the virtual market (look at the success of Citrix over the past decade, which is a technology that comes from a similar paradigm) - and that means that more and more datacenters are converting. While the cost per kwh might be rising, the costs of running a data-center are coming back under control.

What to do

[burnin1965]

While killing services and cutting back on powered equipment is an option people should consider efficiency improvements.

Speaking from experience, a large number of x86 boxes out there are running on power supplies which run in the 60 to 70 percent efficiency range. By replacing old low efficiency power supplies with some of the newer 80plus supplies you will save on electricity for the box and for cooling.

I did some tests with replacing a cheap 250 watt low efficiency power supply with Seasonic 250 watt 80 plus supplies and found a 20%+ reduction in power consumption at the AC outlet. When I ran the numbers the savings in electricity to the power supply alone would pay for the new supply in one year. And that does not include the saving in air conditioning costs.

http://www.seasonic.com/ [seasonic.com]

And no I don't work for them or own stock. :) And there are other 80plus manufacturers, its just that this is the only one I tested.

burnin

Reversible Computing does not produce heat.

[shapr]

Perfectly reversible computing [wikipedia.org] does not produce heat.
Ever wondered what happens to bits that you erase out of memory or a register? They get dumped out of the chip and turn into heat.
Reversible logic reuses the electrical charge for your next computation, or for storing the next 1 that comes along.
On the downside, reversible hardware is much harder to design, but any addition of reverible logic on today's CPUs would decrease the amount of electricity needed and heat produced.
Electricity bills would be lower, and heat output would be smaller.
Laptops would last much longer, desktops wouldn't need a CPU cooler.
Even better, we could continue increasing the speed and diesize of CPUs.
One problem right now is that AMD, Intel, IBM, etc are perfectly able to produce a CPU that they have no hope of cooling. If reversible logic were used instead, you could have a 6GHz chip with the heat output of a 4.77 MHz 8086.

Re:Reversible Computing does not produce heat.

[maxwell demon]

Erasing a bit at 300 K (27C or 80F) theoretically costs a minimal energy of 2.87e-21 J. That is, an ideal non-reversive computer at 3 GHz erasing 1 GByte at each cycle would just need about 70 milliwatt. It's obvious that our current computers are very far from that limit.

Also note that current power supplies are all but efficient. That is, a lot of the energy your computer draws from the grid doesn't even reach the CPU.

Since our main losses are obviously not the inevitable cost of non-reversible computing,

Big Money...

[aaarrrgggh]

For a financial data center ("Tier-4" class, 2(N+1)), the cost per kW is $10-15,000 for infrastructure alone. That quickly matches cost of WinTel boxes (although the depreciation cycle is considerably longer).

Energy Consumption works out close to 3x server power consumption, so 1kW of load is equal to 3kW total energy input. That comes close to $2,700 per year in energy costs for 1kW of server power.

This is simply stupid

[rbrander]

This is just the kind of screwed-up priorities that cause companies to lose all competitive edge.

Good (?) accounting tends to highlight grand total costs of small things. Good Lord, we spend $27,000 per year on paper clips! Better control them under lock & key. The lost-opportunity cost of the contract bid missed because somebody was hunting for paperclips does not, of course, appear on and ledger.

Now somebody has summed up the electrical costs of a really large server room and come up with a sum close to a human salary. That always impresses people. (Man is the measure of all things.)

But what is it as a fraction of total operations and capital?

At 11 cents per kilowatt-hour (a common residential cost except in badly-gouged locales; but high for major consumers, at least until lately and those 27% increases) your rule-of-thumb for 7x24 consumption is:

a buck per watt per year.

500-watt average constant consumption from a basic 3u rack server = $500/year. Easy, no?

But that's a pretty serious machine, home machines don't commonly have over 400W power supplies - and certainly don't use the 400W all the time. So we're allowing for air conditioning power in the estimate.

But a serious server starts at $10,000 and you won't get five years out of it, so the capital cost alone is $2000/year and up.

All but the most automated shops surely have a salaried sysadmin (and/or DBA, backup specialty guy...) for every ten machines. And those guys all cost $50,000 dead minimum. So that's another $5,000 per machined per year for care & feeding.

So that's $7000/year, plus power at $500. Maybe skyrocketing to $700 and a full 10% of costs.

And of course I had to assume that the $10,000 included 5 years of vendor support to keep it that low. Never mind insurance, rent on the space, huge UPS's, fire systems, air conditioning (not the power for it, the machinery). In truth, I can hardly imagine power reaching 10% of the operations cost.

Also, I'm taking some place like NCAR as my site: gargantuan computing power at the service of a dozen professors and their retinue of grad students. Totally running their own programs, not million-dollar software packages like SAP on Oracle. In short, the normal "IT" costs of programmers, analysts, support techs, software vendors, don't exist.

Because when they do, they dwarf the cost of running the server room and power dwindles down to being 10% of 10% of your total IT budget. Which in most companies is 5%-9% of total operating expenditure.

Wailing about this cost - which springs out on the accounting spreadsheet because it is up a large percentage from last year - leads to classic penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions.

Perhaps: "we'll use less power if we consolidate a dozen servers down into one big one". A lot of this has been done by IT departments, whom I swear are pining for the days of the mainframe.

But at least where I work, business didn't move off the mainframe because it was such a high cost per compute cycle - often enough we were increasing our total computing costs to go PC and small server. We did it for the flexibility.

And loss of flexibility could cost a business big - for want of a paperclip.

Re:Unctuous

[wilsonjd]

Have you ever heard of supply and demand? If we fix oil prices at $25 per barrel, the oil companies will just sell it to China at $70, and we will have NONE. If China convinces Venesula to sell them all their oil, we will see $100 oil very soon.

Re:Unctuous

[Stargoat]

First, it's Venezuela. Second, even if that were true, which it is not, oil is a commodity. If Venezuela sells all its oil to China, that will just free up oil elsewhere in the world.

Re:Unctuous

[drinkypoo]

Uh, this is not true. China's demand is new demand. As demand increases, and supply does not, what happens? Note: This is not a bonus question, it is the entire quiz. Granted, production IS increasing, but I don't think that China's demand is going to fail to outstrip it dramatically as they haul themselves into the modern age.

Re:Unctuous

[twiddlingbits]

So you want to fix price oil? Never happen, it's directly anti-capitalist. The MARKET sets the prices, the oil companies spent lots of money to get efficient at $30/bbl oil. They had NOTHING to do with the prices going up, that was part increased demand, part Hurricanes (60%+ of oil and 30%+ of Gulf of Mexico production is still off line..see http://www.mms.gov/ [mms.gov] they updated the offline figures daily), part specualtion by traders. If ANYONE is to be blamed it is the traders and their panic that drove prices

Price gouging is good and really just perception

[colinnwn]

There is really no short-term method governments can control "price gouging" outside of price caps (which is fixing an upper limit on price). Long-term the real issue is caused by the target industry's regulations which create artificial entry barriers.

People use the term "price gouging" anytime they percieve the price of a good is too high. This is a fallicy. The definition of price gouging is http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=price+gou ging [reference.com] pricing above the market when no alternative retailer i

Re:Unctuous

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

Oil still costs about $15 to pump out of the ground, but instead of the $25 price before we invaded Iraq, it's pushing $70+ as a "permanent high".

Supply and demand.

Re:Unctuous

[Vancorps]

Cause demand this year is so much higher than demand last year at this time. Seriously, prices shot up "because of Katrina." They should have plunged back down when the refinaries came back online but they only gave in a little. I imagine a few american based refinary companies are making huge increases in profit this year compared to last. As I recall Exxon/Mobile was reporting 300% profit gains this year. I also seem to remember many a CEO from refinary companies mentioning how Rita would be the biggest d

Re:Unctuous

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

Seriously, prices shot up "because of Katrina." They should have plunged back down when the refinaries came back online but they only gave in a little.

You do realize that US is "borrowing" 2 million barrels a day from the EU, and that many other commodities are experiencing record highs due to the explosion in Asian economic growth.

Re:Unctuous

[hunterx11]

There's not a whole lot we can do about the price short of bombing Vienna, and somehow I doubt even Bush would do that.

Re:Unctuous

[Doc Ruby]

"Exxon Mobil profit leaps on oil prices" [go.com]: "Exxon's quarterly profit was up 75 percent from a year earlier, and revenue rose 32 percent to more than $100 billion [...] $9 billion net profit reported on Thursday by Royal Dutch Shell Plc [...] Exxon said it did not see the point of a windfall profits tax ".

Windfall profits tax. To say nothing of a carbon deposit tax.

Re:Unctuous

[drinkypoo]

It's not only that the oil barons are their most athletic supporters, but that they are oil barons - notably the bushes and cheney. War in the middle east means OPEC raises prices, which means the U.S. oilmen raise prices, and everything is rosy for the oilmen.

Re:Unctuous

[Doc Ruby]

No, Bush and Cheney are public servants, they're acting in the national interest, their personal oil income and industry cronies are just a coincidence. We need oil experts to handle our oil problems. A giant purple dinosaur loves me and just wants to hug me.

Re:Unctuous

[mypalmike]

It's not only that the oil barons are their most athletic supporters ...

I don't think this means what you think it means.

Re:Unctuous

[mc6809e]

Oil still costs about $15 to pump out of the ground,

What a bunch of bullcrap. The cost of pumping oil varies from well to well. Sure, it might cost Saudi Arabian Oil Company $15 per barrel, but if they only release enough oil for half the world's demand, other producers have to fill that supply. It can cost those other suppliers much more to pull oil out of the ground. And that high price is going to lift the market price.

but instead of the $25 price before we invaded Iraq, it's pushing $70+ as a "permanent high". Maybe Congress and the White Hosue can exercise some accountability for their totally failed energy policies (including sending us to war) by stopping the price gouging the oil corporations are abusing us with.

Oh really? So they're just going to tell Saudi Arabia or Venezuala to lower their prices? How are they going to force them to do that? Oh, you mean force American Oil companies. Well here's a clue: American oil companies are bench-warmers in the global oil market. The biggest American company, ExxonMobil, ranks just 16th in the world in total reserves [petrostrategies.org]. They control about 2% of the worlds oil. Hell, even Petronas, a Malaysian company, is bigger than America's biggest oil company.

And looking at the table [petrostrategies.org] you see that the market is dominated by state-owned, national oil companies like Saudi Arabian Oil Company, and Petroleos de Venezuela. The only way you're going to lower the price they charge for oil is to invade and force them. Otherwise they'll sell their oil to the highest bidder.

I know those corporations are their best bribers^Wcontributors, and their foreign sources are our best traitors^Wallies, but Americans will vote on the entire House of Representatives and 1/3 of the Senate in elections next year. We might be willing to put up with a lot of BS on faith, but there's no denying we're not getting the spoils of all of our "superpower" status.

So your complaint is that Bush hasn't invaded enough countries yet to lower oil prices. Interesting.

The fact is state-run foreign oil companies set the price for oil. There is very little the government of the USA can do about it aside from rushing in with tanks to take their oil fields. Any kind of price control on this oil would mean it would get sold to someone else at a higher price, like the Chinese, for example.

Leading Oil and Gas Companies Around the World

Rank by 2004 Oil Equivalent Reserves Company Worldwide Liquids Reserves, Million Barrels Worldwide Natural Gas Reserves, Billion Cubic Feet Total Reserves in Oil Equivalent Barrels, Million Barrels
1 Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Arabia) 2,3 259,400 234,500 299,485
2 National Iranian Oil Company (Iran) 2,3 125,800 940,000 286,484
3 Qatar General Petroleum Corporation (Qatar) 3 15,207 910,000 170,763
4 Gazprom (Russia) 0 988,892 169,041
5 Iraq National Oil Company (Iraq) 2,3 115,000 110,000 133,803
6 Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (UAE) 3 92,200 196,100 125,721
7 Petroleos de Venezuela.S.A. (Venezuela) 3 78,998 149,891 104,620
8 Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (Kuwait) 3 99,000 55 99,009
9 Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (Nigeria) 2,3 35,255 176,000 65,340
10 National Oil Company (Libya) 2,3 39,000 52,000 47,889
11 Sonatrach (Algeria) 2,3 11,800 160,500 39,236
12 OAO Lukoil (Russia) 23,215 39,089 29,897
13 Petronas (Malaysia) 5,290 85,200 19,854
14 PetroChina Co. Ltd. (China) 10,941 44,554 18,557
15 Petroleos Mexicanos (Mexico) 14,803 14,807 17,334
16 ExxonMobil Corporation (United States) 8,395 31,843 13,838
17 BP Corporation (United Kingdom) 5,775 46,650 13,729
18 Egyptian General Petroleum Corp. (Egypt) 2 3,700 58,500 13,700
19 OAO Yukos (Russia) 10,950 7,800 12,283
20 Petroleo Brasilerio S.A. (Brazil) 2 9,945 11,247 11,868

Re:Unctuous

[arkanes]

It's interesting to note that every time someone (a liberal, of course) yells about our dependency on foreign oil and how we have to reduce it (generally via alternate energy sources, and buying less SUVs), the "party line" is that we have signifigant domestic stocks of oil, stop being Chicken Little, consumerism is American, blah blah blah. But whenever the issue is controlling the price of crude, the "party line" is supply and demand, OPEC are the bad guys, etc, etc. Surely there is some sort of discrepen

Re:Unctuous

[Jherek Carnelian]

How do you know it's fuelled by gouging and speculation? How can you say the price is "wrong"? Define "gouging".

Whatever the cause it is evident that something is wrong with the market. As others have pointed out, the oil companies are reporting overwhelmingly huge profits. In an efficient market, cost of production and selling price converge. Since they are currently hugely divergent, somebody is jiggering the system. Since the USA, and anything to do with oil the world around, is pretty much a corptoc

Re:Unctuous

[twiddlingbits]

You forget that the US companies such as Exxon are partners with these National Oil Companies in many of these reserves. In fact the Saudi National Oil Company sold "concessions" to produce and market the oil to American firms as recently as 1998 for certain production.

Saudi Arabs, Americans and Oil
By Robert L. Norberg

Human Resources

In 1949, when Harry Snyder was hired to head up the training of Saudi Arabs for Aramco, James Terry Duce, a company executive in New York, told him what was expected:
Your task at Aramco is to train Saudis as quickly and as soundly as possible to operate the Saudi oil industry. Inevitably, the Saudi Arab Government will eventually nationalize the industry. When that occurs, we want the young Saudis to have attained the proficiency that will enable them to operate the oil industry efficiently and with goodwill toward Aramco. Thus they will be serving their country's best interests and will be protecting the interests of our parent companies.1

This vision of the training mission and its ultimate result might have appeared reasonably attainable if recruits were available from local schools, knew a bit of English, and had some exposure to industrial practices. But those conditions did not exist when the concession agreement was signed in 1933, nor in 1949 as the postwar development of Saudi Arabia's petroleum resources gathered momentum. Tom Barger, a geologist who arrived in Arabia in 1937 and rose to board chairman before retiring in 1969, recalled many years later:
[One] aspect that impressed me was the enormous, inordinate poverty of the inhabitants. As I found out later, nearly everybody was hungry most of the time. . . . There's no education, obviously. The few people who could read and write largely had taught themselves. And there were some very learned men, as a matter of fact, among this population, although most of it was illiterate. They had practically no mechanical skills. We had new employees who couldn't get out of a room because they didn't know how to use a doorknob."2

B. C. Nelson, who served Aramco in employee relations for many years, recalled in 1965 what it had been like for Saudis recruited to Aramco in the early years of the enterprise:
Word spread to the desert and townspeople that in exchange for some physical effort the blue-eyed foreigners would give a man a handful of silver! And so they flocked to Aramco's budding oil centers . . . Imagine the effect on a recruit to be plunged into the mechanical age -- none of which fit in with his prior orientation or culture -- with little or nothing in his experience to help him adjust. The most amazing thing about these times in terms of one small facet of an Industrial Relations problem -- absenteeism-was not that, when they were handed their bag of money, they returned to their tribe with their glad tidings, but rather that they ever came back to work. Industrial discipline was practically unknown, so the amazing thing was that there was only a 75 percent turnover in the first few years.3

On-the-job training began on an informal basis in the 1930s and was soon complemented by rudimentary industrial training in classrooms. But without English, Arabic literacy, and basic arithmetic, there was a limit to the progress Saudis could make in job performance and advancement. In 1944, with operations revived after a wartime suspension, the Jabal (meaning "mountain" or "hill") School was opened in Dhahran.
Surely in 1944 no one expected history to remember the humble Jabal School. Yet the little company school endures as a symbol for development -- not for the development of an oil company, but for the development of a generation of very special young men. Many Saudis were introduced to the mystery of letters and numbers at the Jabal School. Among them were future scholars, successful businessmen and powerful executives.4

The Jabal School was the beginning of an ever-evolving, structured program of job-related training and general education that replicated under corpor

Re:Unctuous

[Doc Ruby]

"About $15" is approximate. The industry average was actually about $12:bbl when I researched it in 2002. I'm just building in inflation and a margin of error.

Re:Unctuous

[Doc Ruby]

We have existing price gouging and windfall profits laws to protect the consumers who define the market. We're spending and additional $QUARTER-TRILLION in Iraq, which is driving up prices and thereby profits. We have put the entire country's security, military and economic, at risk for these oil corporations, and they're reaping unprecedented profits, even atop last year's unprecedented profits. We're sacrificing economic growth and people's lives. We need to make the oil corporations share the cost. Corpo

Re:Unctuous

[Doc Ruby]

Reinvesting that money in safe fuels would be good. Damaging the economy to fund petrocorps' various antiliability strategies is bad. I'm encouraged to hear that SUV sales are drying up, that the American car corps which bet on those vile machines are sliding towards bankruptcy. But that would happen anyway. I'd rather see windfall taxes, gouging fines, pollution fines and eventual supply constraints all impede the Greenhouse pollution we're currently subsidizing every possible way. Of all those mechanisms,

Re:Folding

[$RANDOMLUSER]

This is about data centers.
Trust me, the cost of a roomful of PCs running Seti is nothing compared to keeping a 20-ton Liebert running 24x7.

Re:Folding

[ichigo 2.0]

Now that "free" idle cpu cycles are getting more expensive to produce, and with newer processors going into power-save modes when idle, I wonder if we'll see a distributed computing project that buys cpu cycles from it's participants. It would probably only make sense for companies to do something like that, but it could still be cheaper than building or renting your own supercomputer.

Re:Folding

[dextromulous]

If everyone stopped running none essential services during the winter, it would ease the energy burdon.

Do you mean, to conserve energy, don't run non-essential services during the summer? Most people can deal with the excess heat generated by computers during the winter (hence a smaller net energy loss.) It is in the summer that you come across problems with wasting energy. Every extra Watt of energy you generate in the summer needs about another Watt (correct me if I'm wrong here) of energy spent to

Re:Folding

[Doppler00]

Are you kidding me? I overclock my computer by 10% during the winter and increase the monitor power save timeto 30 minutes (from 10) just to warm my apartment up a little bit more. Given the double cost of natural gas this winter, keeping the area around my computer warm (where I'm sitting most the time anyway) might be more cost efficient.

Re:Power Hungry - laptop solution

[saskboy]

I've never been a big fan of laptops, I enjoy installing new video cards too much to like an un-upgradable lappy. But with power the way it is, and the nearly silent operation of a laptop, I really have to consider it. I use my computer for TV, and music, and the fans are getting so loud along with the hard drives, that I just don't think I will go the desktop route again. Even if I don't tote my laptop around and instead use it as a "silent" and low power-use desktop, I'm beginning to think it's a bette

Re:No Problem!

[plopez]

Babbages goal was to do computation by steam. Congratulations!

Also, you are not far off. Most of the electricity in the US comes from coal.

Re:How much does power cost really matter?

[NerveGas]

Well, let's see. In our one measly rack, we have two 20-amp circuits, and we're above 80% continual utilization on both. That's about 4 kilowatts, figure about 3 averaged over a 24-hour period. Over 30 days, 24 hours/day, that's over 2,000 kilowatt-hours. If they're paying 10 cents per kW/h, that's $200 per month in power bills for them.

How much do we pay for the cabinet and extra power circuit? $775. Right there, that's about 25% of the cost. Now, remember that they need to provide the cooling for

Multi-cores not necessarily bad

[calidoscope]

On a side note, the current push it toward multi-core CPUs.

One of the selling points for Sun's Niagara is that a single Niagara processor can do the work of a bunch of single core servers - for about the same amount of power as one single core server.