[Techtalk] going green

[Rudy Zijlstra]

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.
- those are the subsystems i can come up with that are easy to reduce a
bit. Do the systems have PCI cards that are not used, or need to be only
in some systems? if so, remove those. Other components that are not
used, yet often powered? 
- then you can indeed investigate the route you are now thinking about.
In that one i do not have experience, and very interested in what others
come up with

Cheers,


Rudy

> 
> thanks,
> maria
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