[Techtalk] going green

[Daniel Pittman]

Lana Brindley <lbrindle at redhat.com> writes:
> On 07/01/2010 07:59 AM, Maria McKinley wrote:
>
>> I am getting pressure from my boss to make our servers/computers "more
>> green", but am at a bit of a loss as to what to do. Not even sure if this
>> is something to tackle in software or hardware. It seems what I want, at
>> least for the cluster, is something that keeps track of demand, and turns
>> on or wakes up computers when more processing power is needed, but not sure
>> how to implement something like this. Currently, people look on a web page
>> to see which computers are being used the least, and then log onto those
>> computers to do computations.

[...]

> In terms of scheduling jobs to run on under-utilised systems, you could do
> worse than a grid setup. Something like this: http://www.redhat.com/mrg/grid/

*nod*  We use Condor[1] at work, which supports Unix and Win32, and has a
built-in facility to sleep and wake systems on demand to meet load
requirements.

If your staff already log in to the servers then getting them used to Condor
shouldn't be a huge burden — the biggest hurdle to acceptance, in my
experience, is the delay between submission and the job starting execution.

(While that is only a minute or two, some people get very fussy when their
 four hour CPU-bound process doesn't start running the second they press the
 "go" button.)

        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/

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