Government Computer News
Stocking stuffers
Power consumption
At this year’s SC06 supercomputing conference in Tampa, Fla., Top500.org organizer Erich Strohmaier suggested adding a new metric to the ones he uses to evaluate the world’s most powerful computers: power efficiency.
For years, data center managers did not have to worry about how much power their servers gobbled up—after all, the electricity bill went straight to accounting. With processors taking up ever more wattage—and electric rates spiking—the issue hit a critical threshold this year.
At the High Performance Computing and Communications Conference in Newport, R.I., Thomas Zacharia, associate lab director at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, outlined ORNL’s plans to build the world’s first petascale computer, which will be built from 24,000 microprocessors. The laboratory will need a 170-megawatt substation to support this project.
Fortunately, the industry has taken notice. Intel Corp. rolled out a new line of Xeon processors, originally codenamed Woodcrest, that the company claims can ultimately boost performance by 80 percent while reducing power consumption by 35 percent. Introduced late last year, the new UltraSPARC T1 from Sun Microsystems Inc. also works at a lower wattage while offering the ability to execute more threads simultaneously.
The government is paying attention, too. Perceiving a lack of solid power-to-performance metrics for increasingly electricity-hungry data centers, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star efficiency program has turned its efforts to the server market. This fall, the program released a set of metrics that can be used for measuring server energy efficiency.
| |||
| Latest News |  WashingtonTechnology.com |
FCW.com |
|
![1105 Government Information Group [purity]](/images/1105logo_website.gif "Government Computer News [purity]")
© 1996-2008 1105 Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
