[Techtalk] going green

[Maria McKinley]

Rudy Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-06-30 at 23:48 -0700, Maria McKinley wrote:
>> Rudy Zijlstra wrote:
>>> Hi Maria,
>>>
>>> On Wed, 2010-06-30 at 14:59 -0700, 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. But, to make the other 
>>>> scenario work, would need some central place to log on, and then have 
>>>> the computer decide where to send the process, and whether to "wake up" 
>>>> a computer. Any ideas or experience with this sort of stuff out there?
>>> There are several SW steps you can take, even without having people
>>> change their habits, by taking a look at system build-up
>>>
>>> - do the systems have non-system disks that can be put in sleep mode
>>> when not in use? modern disks can be told to spin-down after so many
>>> seconds of no activity. I've had good results with that on 2 file
>>> servers. 
>>> - Use on-demand scheduling for the processors. This will put them in
>>> low-power mode when not in use and reduce power consumption that way.
>> Thanks for the ideas, and I should probably should know this, but... Can 
>> you give me a little more information about how on-demand scheduling for 
>> the processors is accomplished? Is this a bios thing, an operating 
>> system thing or something that is built into certain hardware?
> 
> for a good introduction to ondemand scheduling, see:
> 
> http://www.lesswatts.org/tips/cpu.php
> 
> Normally the BIOS on not involved in any way. 
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 
> Rudy
> 
> 
Looks like an excellent resource, thanks.

~maria