In message <Pine.WNT.4.61.0410261429110.3340@vanadium.hq.nac.net>, Alex Rubenst ein writes:
Hello,
I've done quite a bit of studyin power usage and such in datacenters over the last year or so.
I'm looking for information on energy consumption vs percent utilization. In
other words if your datacenter consumes 720 MWh per month, yet on average your servers are 98% underutilized, you are wasting a lot of energy (a hot topic these days). Does anyone here have any real data on this?
I've never done a study on power used vs. CPU utilization, but my guess is that the heat generated from a PC remains fairly constant -- in the grand scheme of things -- no matter what your utilization is.
I doubt that very much, or we wouldn't have variable speed fans. I've monitored CPU temperature when doing compilations; it goes up significantly. That suggests that the CPU is drawing more power at such times. Of course, there's another implication -- if the CPU isn't using the power, the draw from the power line is less, which means that much less electricity is being used. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb