Above are servers that use Intel chips. A new study released today
estimates that the worldwide power consumption of servers such as these
doubled from 2000 to 2005.
Intel
A new report quantifies the electricity consumption of servers, revealing a startling trend.
A report issued today estimates that the overall electricity used by servers--computers that make up the networks of organizations, from small businesses to giant financial institutions--doubled between 2000 and 2005. The reasons for this growth rate were an increase in the number of servers installed in data centers and the demands of auxiliary equipment such as cooling fans and facility lighting, says Jonathan Koomey, staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and author of the report. "I was surprised by the doubling," says Koomey. "I expected some growth, but not quite as large."
In 2005, servers and their auxiliary equipment accounted for an estimated 1.2 percent of all power consumption in the United States and 0.8 percent worldwide, the report states. Koomey says that server power consumption in the United States was the equivalent of that of the entire state of Mississippi in 2005; that year, 20 other states used less power. The report, titled "Estimating Total Power Consumption by Servers in the U.S. and the World," was funded by AMD and peer-reviewed by the major companies that sell servers, including Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, and Dell.
Prior to the report, the server and data-center industry hadn't had an up-to-date, well-researched estimate of server power consumption, says Koomey. The report relies on detailed data from IDC, a research firm, on the number of preexisting installed servers and shipments of servers, as well as on measured data and estimates of the power used per server for the most common models in each class of server.
The report is important to the industry, says Koomey, because once power consumption can be quantified, companies can make better decisions about how to reduce it and save money. "The industry sees that one of the first things you need to do to address the problem is to figure out how big it is," he says.
Even without this report, companies in the industry have assumed that servers and data centers consume more power than they should, which has prompted the development of technology and practices to curb power consumption. Intel and AMD, for instance, have been touting more-energy-efficient microprocessors during the past year. And for years HP has been working with estimates that closely match the report's findings, which have been used to inform data-center research at the company, says Chandrakant Patel, HP fellow. "It corroborates our thinking and gives us quantification that might have been lacking before. The good news is, reports such as this ... serve as a good reference."
Far-flung data centers could use otherwise unharvestable renewable energy for computation.
The social network breaks an unwritten rule by giving away plans to its new data center—an action it hopes will make the Web more efficient.
Not a reason to build more nuc reactors
Nuclear reactors won't make a dent in today's power needs.
They are incredibly expensive. One of the most expensive forms of electricity.
They take 10 years from planning and approval to operation typically.
They take 2,400 highly skilled personnel each.
in US individual reactors are down for refueling every 2 years, unlike new modular designs, or possibly the untried-yet but good idea traveling wave breeder reactor.
Highly toxic hazardous waste has to either be left hanging around the plant forever till de-commisioning after 30 years (another major expense) or be hauled around the country expensively subsidized by govt to a waste repository that is required by law for feds to build but has not been built yet.
The industry get govt subsidized liability insurance as no electric company wants to build a nuclear plant if they'd be liable for costs incurred of cleanup and not being able to use hundreds of square miles after spilling highly toxic waste aka three mile island or chernobyl.
They are also terrorist targets.
So they are a bad business decision
Our own human brain uses a 20-25%* of our bodily energy -- a developing brain up to 60%*. So, it's not surprising that the developing global brain is going to gobble for awhile. Feed it.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain "Wiki-truth"
You are forgetting about savings
I would suggest that although the cpus in servers and such consume some quite large amounts of power, it is highly likely that the information these servers manitain and provide access to save untold amounts of power consumption. Without these servers much of the increased communication and the rest that goes along with the internet, have provided us with huge productivity and effieciency gains in the daily activities of the workforce world wide. So yes, there is a cost, but I believe you have forgotten to mention the benfits that are produced by these servers. I imagine it is fairly difficult to quanify the benefits but they more than outweigh the power consumption costs.
Sun Microsystems has been selling "more energy efficient" servers for a while now, under the CoolThreads label -- see http://www.sun.com/processors/whitepapers/UST1_pwr_v1.0.pdf
Here's a snippet from one of their customers, Matthias Schorer, Chief Architect at Fiducia IT AG:
"Unpacking the box we couldn't believe a 32 thread server could be so small. But after running our own benchmarks it's pretty clear that looks can be deceiving. With the Sun Fire T2000 servers we'll be able to replace our current servers at a rate of 4:1 while doubling our performance. And if that's not enough it, it looks like we'll be able to cut our energy use from 5.2 to .35 kw/hour. That's a factor of 14. Amazing!"
More at http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/testimonials/
So anyone still burning the megawatts with Intel should be looking at changing over to save money and CO2!
Re: Sun is ahead of AMD and Intel
Have a look at the next generation of the Cool Threads technology (a.k.a. Niagara2) in this presentation delivered at ISSCC - http://www.opensparc.net/pubs/preszo/07/n2isscc.pdf
The energy consumption between 2000 and 2005 may have doubled, but has anyone looked at the trend (not numbers, but rate of growth) in the 5 years since? I would suspect that the rapid adoption of cloud and virtualization has slowed that growth rate. Would be interesting to see the curve.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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New Energy Star Specification
According to recent reports, the Energy Star program is due to release new computer specifications in July. The federal government must purchase Energy Star qualifying products, but it will be interesting to see if current electric bills are high enough to persuade corporations to purchase and vendors to develop Energy Star complaint servers.
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