Interesting. Flippingly remarked in my last post that I wondered what the energy/thermal ratings were for the Top 500 clustered systems, and then this morning stumbled on the Green 500 list at http://green500.org.
My first thought was "how in the world do you measure power consumption across so many clustered systems??" And it appears that they calculate the overall power consumption depending on what can be measured, then the overall metric is calculated. The web site even nicely provides a tutorial paper on how to calculate / determine your power consumption.
http://green500.org/docs/tutorials/tutorial.pdf
More stuff to read and try this week. Time to pull the power meter over to a small Linpack test system running the latest RHEL 5.1 release where we recently pushed a number of publishes out and see what's happening. We regularly play with Linpack on the single SMP servers to make sure they scale fairly linearly (ie: 4-core to 8-core to 16-core) and this may be a good way to apply some power consumption metrics to the performance metrics. Linpack is good because it's fairly steady-state for a relatively long period (depending of course on how big you define the problem size to be solved).
Naturally... what, when, and how to measure watts and thermal and energy consumption for systems under test are going through many debates and discussions these days in the industry these days. A whole new dimension of being able to say "well, it depends" when asked about performance and the trade-offs. If you get a chance, watch what happens with SPEC.org's SPECpower initial benchmark (at http://www.spec.org/specpower/ ). This initial benchmark is focused on CPU centric workloads, but more dimensions are undoubtedly coming.
No comments:
Post a Comment