The Problem of Power Consumption in Servers - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

The Problem of Power Consumption in Servers

L. Minas and B. Ellison

Intel-Lab

In Dr. Dobb’s Journal, May 2009

Prepared and presented by Yan Cai

Fall 2009 Green Computing

• Server energy consumption has increased from 50w to 250w since 2000
• Energy cost will exceed the server cost if this trend does not change

Source: IDC, Scaramella 2006

• Motivation
• Where heat comes from
• How cooling is achieved
• How power is consumed
• Conclusions

• Server form factor
• Server power consumption is affected by server form factor, including
• the individual configuration,
• the heat and thermal environment
• the workload being processed
• …

2U

Pedestal

1U

Blade

• The amount of heat, (Q), generated by an integrated circuit is a function of
• The efficiency of the components' design (e)
• The technology used in its manufacturing process (t)
• The frequency and voltage at which it operates (f,v)
• Over-clocking also generates a great amount of heat

• Motivation
• Where heat comes from
• How cooling is achieved
• How power is consumed
• Conclusions

• Two common methods
• Heat sinks
• Fans

Natural convection heat sink (Source: Wikipedia, 2008)

• Motivation
• Where heat comes from
• How cooling is achieved
• How power is consumed
• Conclusions

Estimated Average Power Use (W) per Server

Estimated Average Power Use (W) per Server, by Server Class, 2000 to 2006 (Source: Koomey J 2007b Estimating Total Power Consumption by Servers in the US and the World. Oakland, CA: Analytics Press)

Google container Data Center

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I

• Power consumption of a Quadcore Intel Xeon server

Server Power Consumption (Source: Intel Labs, 2008)

• Power consumption of components

• Total power consumption
• Estimation of power consumption

CPU Utilization and Power Consumption (Source: Blackburn 2008)

• The memory demand is growing in the future, because
• More processors on chip,
• Increasing use of virtualization,
• More memory intensive search applications (Google and Facebook)
• The memory power consumption is growing in the future
• The more the memories, the larger the power consumption
• The faster the memories, the larger the power consumption

• Memory Power Comparison

RDIMM Memory Power Comparison (Source: Intel Platform Memory Operation, 2007)

• Power consumption by vendors and configurations

RDIMM Power Consumption by Vendor and Configuration (Sources: Publicly-available datasheets from each vendor, 2008)

• 64GB system power consumption

Future DIMM Power Consumption by Frequency, Configuration, and Capacity (Source: Intel Platform Memory Operation, 2008)

• How to reduce memory energy consumption
• By doing thermal analysis, embedding thermal sensors and throttling

1U Server Architecture (Source: Intel Labs, 2006)

• Memory throttling mechanisms
• Closed loop thermal throttling (CLTT)
• Closed loop, rely on thermal sensors
• Open loop throughput throttling (OLTT)
• Open loop, work based on bandwidth count
• Memory throttling degrades performance

• Power supply efficiency vs. utilization level

Server Power Supply Efficiency Test Report (Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2004)

• Average hard disk power consumption for average operations
• Average hard disk power consumption for IO intensive operations

• High-end servers consume more power, but might be less efficient in terms of power consumption
• At present, CPU still consumes the most power, compared to other components
• In the future, memory can consume more power than CPU
• Considering a significant amount of power loss, the efficiency of power supplies is also very important
• The power consumption by hard drives is closely related to the workload the server is processing