The making of energy efficient datacenters
by Amarjyoti Krishnan, HOD, Bobcares.com
Published on: 15th Oct 2004
The
Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron is a wonderful movie to
watch. It is based on the book, The anatomy of greed,
written by a former employee of Enron, Brian Cruver. One
interesting thing that comes on our minds is the size of all power
companies. They are all huge.
We depend on power for just about
everything and yet very rarely do we think about conserving energy. A
typical PC for example consumes about 135 watts of power. A Datacenter
with about a 1000 servers should typically take about 135 x 1000 Watts
or 135 Kilowatts and that would just power the computers. This does not
include the air-conditioning and lighting. According to to a research
paper sponsored by The California Energy Commission in a datacenter
about 50% of the total energy consumed is by the servers and
about 35% is used by the Air conditioners.
Here is some interesting research done in this field -
- Feeling
the heat- An interesting paper by Liebert describing the challenge
of effectively managing the heat dissipation in datacenters.
This problem can be solved by making better energy efficient air
conditioners and by making more energy efficient computers. Many
companies have taken a lot of interest
in this subject. However, nothing substantial has been done primarily
because of the market requirements. End users still want to host
their sites on the fastest processors which drives the market with the
latest processors. We would reach a time soon when
the energy required would be much higher than the energy available in
the market.
Intel, AMD, Transmeta and Via have all released processors which
consume very low power. A typical Pentium or AMD processor consumes
about 25 Watts of power, whereas these low powered processors take only
about 5 watts of power i.e. about 5 low powered processors would
consume as much power as a single main stream processor of today.
Intel has the Centrino which has lower power consumption than the regular Pentiums.
Intel also has the RISC arm
processors.
These low powered processors are also generally fan less processors which
means lower noise levels too.
Low powered processors have a very small Form Factor too. This means that one can
have more such servers in the same space that is typically allocated to
a high powered servers. All datacenters use a profitability matrix
based on the following rule: Performance/Per Watt/Per Cubic Foot.
This is one place where the low powered processors really score high.
On the flip side, most of these low powered processors work
only at about 1.2GHz or lower. So they won't be as fast the pentium4s.
Which means one would have to host lesser sites per server. A regular pentium 4
server would be able to host around 600 sites. A low powered processor on the
other hand should comfortably host about 200 sites.
 AMD Geode NX Processor family
comprises of the AMD Geode NX 1250@6W processor, the AMD Geode
NX 1500@6W processor and the AMD Geode NX 1750@14W processor. The
first two consume only 6 Watts of power and run without a
cooling fan. According to AMD they provide the highest x86 performance
for fan less operations. They are based on the mobile AMD Athlon
processor technology.
Transmeta
was one of the first companies to develop low powered processors. For a
long time Transmeta was known as the company where the
Microsoft co founder Paul Allen had interests in and the place
where Linus Trovalds, the father Linux, worked. Both of them are no
longer part of the organization. Today they are known for the two
processor families they have - The Transmeta Crusoe and
the Transmeta
Efficeon
Transmeta Crusoe-
processors range from 500Mhz to 1.2 Ghz. According to Transmeta, Crusoe is a unique combination of
software and hardware. It's this radical design that gives Crusoe its
important advantages, and manufacturers of all kinds of electronic
devices their first truly innovative new platform in over 25 years.
Thanks to Crusoe, mobile devices can be made smaller and lighter than
ever. These new devices will be more comfortable to use, too, because
Crusoe generates very little heat a problem that plagues the industry's
legacy hardware-only processors. And because it uses far less power,
mobile devices running on Crusoe run far longer on a single battery
charge, and Crusoe-powered ultra-dense servers do far more work per
watt, far more efficiently.
Transmeta
Efficeon processors are the higher end processors from Transmeta
and they run at upto 1.6Ghz and have high performance I/O interfaces.
They are built upon Fujitsu next-generation 90nm silicon technology
featuring transistors with a length of just 40nm.
The entire Transmeta range not just uses the x86 instruction set, they
also have full multimedia instruction support (MMX, SSE-SSE2).
Transmeta has done very little in marketing in terms of selling their
products for the server market. Like all other companies they have
focussed on mobile products, set-top boxes etc.. While these products are
great for the mobile market, they do have a great potential in the
server market. FIC, JM-Net etc. have some products for the server market
which run on the Transmeta processors.
Via, the Taiwanese manufacturer
purchased the Cyrix processors and has since gotten out of the race of
faster processors with AMD and Intel. Instead they are focussing on fan
less, low-powered processors. They have the Eden and the C3 range of
processors. The power consumption varies from only 7watts to
15 Watts. Additionally, the processors come with the
PadLock Hardware Security Suite which provides a platform approach to
computer security, ensuring uncompromising security performance. These
features include the implementation of the Quantum-based VIA PadLock
RNG (Random Number Generator), and the VIA PadLock ACE (Advanced
Cryptography Engine) supporting AES encryption.
According to Via, the VIA Eden-N
Processor is the world's smallest, lowest power and most secure
native x86 processor. It is a mere 15mm x 15mm in terms of size and
consumes between 2.5W @ 533MHz to 7W @ 1GHz.
 
Via again like Transmeta has not focussed in the server market. The
images above give a good idea of the benefits of this processor in the
server market. For datacenters, Via may be the best in the Performance/Per Watt/Per Cubic Foot matrix.
Companies like Hitachi make some very good low powered hard disk drives
which have a very small form factor. They have both IDE's at 7200 rpm
as well as SCSI hard drives.
Many may think it is better to take higher end servers as the power or
heating problem does not directly affect them. As mentioned earlier a
server driven by a low-powered processor would be able to take just
about 200 sites. This means that a person with 600 sites would need to
take 3 such servers instead of one higher powered server. Here are some
benefits of this scenario.
One of the biggest factors influencing the performance of sites on the
internet is the capability of the network card (ethernet) . When all the
sites are
hosted on just one server, they would use the same network
card to push the data. If these sites are distributed on 3
servers, the data that the sites can push would be 3 times more,
which means faster access to the sites. Another benefit is that if one of the site goes down all 600 people would not be effected, rather only 1/3rd the number of sites would be affected.
Hence, the number of support request would be lesser. And finally, such
processors are very affordable. Typically they would be just a third of the cost of regular mainstream processors.
For more information:
Amarjyoti Krishnan
HOD, Design and Development
1-(603)-724-6595
Personal Blog site
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