[ale] Server Power Reduction

[Greg Clifton]

Yeah, what he said. Also if you are looking at new hardware, not just trying
to cut down the footprint of existing machines, the Intel Nehalem family
(5500 and 5600 series Xeons for single or dual socket with 2, 4 or 6 cores
per proc and Core i5 or i7 for uni processor). The Nehalem architecture
features something that AMD does not have, "Speed Step and Turbo Boost," as
I recall, that allows the CPU to actually turn off all but one core
depending on the load and automatically over-clock said core so long as the
CPU remains within the thermal envelope. AMD's new stuff throttles based on
load (which Intel's previously didn't) and I think also based on core temp
as Intel's have for years. Do NOT buy any Intel Xeon 5400 series product as
these require FB DIMM memory with ~ a 5W penalty per DIMM module for the
buffer in addition to the power consumption of the RAM itself.

A minor consideration would be using DDR3 RAM as required by the Intel
Nehalem and the AMD 6000 series (8 or 12 cores per CPU) and their new 4000
series (6 cores), it runs at lower voltage and overall power consumption
than DDR2. AMD is promoting the 4000 series for the lowest wattage per core
on the planet. They have a 6 core that runs at 35W if memory serves so that
works out to 7W per core. Take that Adam!

One other item that might be more significant than the RAM  would be to use
2.5" drives vs. 3.5" drives. They come in capacities up to 1TB now and run
much cooler and are inherently more rugged (and designed to power up and
down in the notebook world to save battery power). If you need lots of
storage, we have 2U chassis w/ up to 24 of them and a 4U chassis with 48x
2.5" bays.

Oh, and speaking of water cooling, I just saw a headline today or yesterday
regarding IBM announcing a water cooled system. I didn't read the article,
but I think it was with PPC 7 chips.

GC

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 6:05 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:

> Disk spin down is a big power saver but drive lifespan is a function of
> spinups. It's a nasty tradeoff.
>
> Cooling is a HUGE expense. Systems run fine with ambient air at 90F. Moving
> air is cheaper than cooling air. So large fans and higher flow with warmer
> intake temps will lower power bills.
>
> Hmm. With liquid cooling and a large heat-sink reservoir, it would be easy
> to soak up excess heat during the hot day into the heat sink and then
> exhausting the heat during the cooler night without the use of compressors -
> just water pumps and large radiators and maybe evaporative cooling with
> water.
>
> Shift to HE Opteron systems as they have better performance/watt numbers.
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 5:44 PM, Jeff Hubbs <jhubbslist at att.net> wrote:
>
>>  What hardware/software features do I need to look for with respect to
>> reducing the amount of electric power a Linux server requires (beyond
>> n.-s.-Sherlocks like fewer cores/drives/DIMMs)?  I'm talking about
>> things like clock speed control - perhaps even disk spin-down (unless I
>> go SSDs).
>>
>> - Jeff
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>
>
>
> --
> --
> James P. Kinney III
> Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness
> Doing pretty well on all 3 pursuits
>
>  Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by
> faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits.
>    Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith", 1992
>
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