IBM and HP’s Green Data Centers

February 25, 2009 Dave Ohara

Ovum has an article about IBM and HP’s efforts in Green Data Centres.

Graham Titterington

IBM and HP move towards green data centres

Recent announcements from IBM and HP show that energy consumption in the data centre is now attracting high-level attention in both enterprises and IT vendors. Graham Titterington compares these two initiatives and puts them into a wider perspective.

IBM announced enterprise additions to its Project Big Green this week, a week after HP announced its Sustainability Laboratory. Both vendors have a history of interest in this area, but HP has achieved a higher profile for its efforts. The HP announcement included long-term data centre issues while IBM concentrated on new product releases to help in this area. However, there were large areas of agreement and overlap in the two presentations, and both said that energy use has become a high-level concern for enterprises, which will grow in importance. Both see an immediate opportunity for savings in energy use with a strong financial investment case through monitoring and intelligent control systems. IBM talks of the payback period from investments in this area being less than two years. Both back these claims with case studies, although at this early stage these are thin on the ground at present. The environmental payback period may be longer where this involves hardware replacement.

Comparing Smart Cooling vs. Monitoring.

The medium term - monitoring and intelligent control

HP claims it has achieved a 40% energy saving at a new data centre it has recently built in Bangalore by deploying its 'smart cooling' technology. IBM claims similar savings in the short term by deploying its current technology including its new monitoring systems. Tivoli monitoring software has been extended from processor monitoring to include all aspects of the data centre facility. It monitors kilowatts of power consumption, and not just processor utilisation. It provides connections into several important business activities to make it an attractive proposition for business:

HP is taking inventory of energy consumption along the supply chain.

HP has shown a commendable attention to lifetime issues in its green IT agenda. This is continuing in the current announcement. It points out that the energy required to smelt bauxite into aluminium to make a server is equivalent to the energy the server will use in two years of its life. It is now embarking on a project to build up a database of lifecycle energy consumption to create a comprehensive database from which lifecycle issues can be more accurately evaluated. It promises to put the results in the public domain, and is appealing for partners to help populate this.

Zero-Emissions City in the Desert

February 25, 2009 Dave Ohara

In my visit to MIT earlier this week I heard of MIT’s participation in Abu Dhabi’s green metropolis. Here is the article in Technology Review.

Energy surplus: Masdar headquarters, shown in an architectural rendering, is designed to generate more renewable electricity than it consumes; it would be the first large-scale, multi-use building to do so.
Credit: ©Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture

The city will be an oasis of renewable energy in a country of five million, made rich by oil, that consumes the most natural resources per capita in the world. Seen one way, it's just the latest ostentatious project in a country that's been defined by them. Indeed, the UAE is already home to the world's tallest building and an enormous indoor ski facility that features a 200-meter-long black-diamond slope. Real-estate developers have dredged coral and sand from the sea floor, piling it up in the Persian Gulf to create islands in the shape of palm trees and a map of the world.

Yet many experts are optimistic that the city can become a test bed for new approaches to the engineering and architectural problems involved in creating environmentally sustainable cities. Although architects have already designed and builders constructed many small zero-emissions residences and commercial buildings, projects involving large, multi-use commercial buildings have fallen short of expectations, using too much energy or failing to generate enough. Part of the problem is the growing complexity that comes with scale, says J. Michael McQuade, senior vice president of science and technology at United Technologies in Hartford, CT; today's design software hasn't been able to handle it. But Masdar City, itself developed with the help of extensive modeling, will be wired from the beginning to collect data that could prove valuable for developing better models. That information could make future zero-emissions cities cheaper and easier to build.

Why?

And the development is meant to make money, not just introduce new technology. "We want Masdar City to be profitable, not just a sunk cost," said Khaled Awad, the project's director of property development, at a huge real-estate exhibition in Dubai last fall. "If it is not profitable as a real-estate development, it is not sustainable." Yet if it is, it may be replicable.

Microsoft Research Predicting Problems in the Data Center

February 25, 2009 Dave Ohara

Microsoft posts on its Techfest event and Predicting Problems in the Data Center.

Moises Goldszmidt (above), principal researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, is showing a pair of demos, in conjunction with lab colleague Mihai Budiu, that examines performance in data centers.

"The challenge," Goldszmidt says, "is: How do I summarize thousands of machines and hundreds of metrics and find the key elements over that huge space that's giving us surprises, such that I can let it retrieve that fingerprint? How do I do that automatically?"

The demo is called Predicting Problems in the Data Center.

"We are using very sophisticated machine-learning techniques," Goldszmidt states, "that build automated models that are able to extract the main characteristics of each one of these crises."

The value of such work is readily apparent.

"Eighty percent of the time, we're predicting one hour in advance a set of actions we need to do to mitigate a problem," he says, resulting in "less downtime, less latency for our clients using our services. Our services are more efficient to run, because we don't have to have that many people look at the problem."

Microsoft Research Builds Intel Atom Servers

February 25, 2009 Dave Ohara

Intel has got to be hating this publicity. Microsoft using Intel Atom chips to build servers. I”ve been blogging on the idea of using Intel Atom’s for servers, and people laughed at the performance. But, if you think about where the future of Intel Atom chips the rapid growth of Netbooks, Intel is getting phenomenal pressure to increase performance per watt.

DataCenterKnowledge reports on Microsoft Research’s use of Intel Atom based servers at Techfest.

Microsoft’s Low-Power Server Prototype
February 24th, 2009 : Rich Miller
How low can your server power go? Microsoft is investigating that question in a project by its new Cloud Computing Futures (CCF) research unit, which aims to reduce data center costs by “four-fold or greater.” The new group was introduced today at the Microsoft TechFest in Redmond. One of CCF’s initial research projects is testing the viability of a small cloud computing server farm using low-power Intel Atom processors originally designed for use in netbooks and mobile applications.

“In addition to requiring far less energy - 5 watts versus 50 to 100 watts for a processor typically used in a data center- low-power processors also have quiescent states that consume little energy and can be awakened quickly,” explained Dan Reed, director of Scalable and Multicore Systems for Cloud Computing Futures. “These states are used in the sleep and hibernate features of laptops and netbooks. With our current Atom processor, its energy consumption when running is 28 to 34 watts, but in the sleep or hibernate state, it consumes 3 to 4 watts, a reduction of 10 times in the energy consumption of idle processors.”

In this brief video, CCF Director of Software Architecture Jim Larus demonstrates a prototype rack packed with these low-power processors:

That wasn’t the only data center project discussed at TechFest.

The article continues posting on the use of closed loop feedback for dynamically adjusting the servers available.

The Cloud Computing Futures team also discussed Marlowe, a system for selectively putting idle servers into a low-power state. Reed said Marlowe “highlights the power of an intelligent control system that can determine when to put a processor to sleep and when to awaken it to service the workload.

“This problem has two interesting challenges,” he said. “The first is to estimate how many processors are necessary to handle a given workload by responding to every request in a timely manner. (By analogy, how many checkout clerks should be at the cash registers?) The second is to anticipate the workload in the near future, since it takes 5 to 15 seconds to awaken a processor from sleep and 30 to 45 seconds for hibernate. The system needs to hold some processors in reserve and to anticipate the workload 5 to 45 seconds in the future to ensure that sufficient servers are available.”

The solution was a closed-loop control system. “It works by taking regular measurements of the system, such as CPU utilization, response time, and energy consumption; combining this data with the estimated future workload; then adjusting the number of servers in each power state,” Reed said.

But this is not a new idea. Cornell Medical school’s Biomedicine dept has been doing this for over 2 years. Here was my blog entry 1 1/2 years ago.

This facility is one of the only places I know of that turns off servers when they are not needed. For IT Pros they do the equivalent of turning off the lights when they leave the office this holiday weekend. Think about how many servers are running these next 4 days from Thurs – Sun with no load on them. Would anyone notice if they were turned off?

The amazing thing is the Biomedicine department has been turning off their servers in a high performance compute cluster for the past 6 months and the users don’t notice a change in service, because they turn off and on the compute nodes in response to the job queue. There aren’t going to be that many research scientist submitting jobs on Thanksgiving day. And, as each compute job is completed and sits idle, there is an automated system that turns off the servers. When new compute resources are required as new jobs are submitted on Monday, the machines are turned back on.

To put this in #’s there are 100 servers in the compute node which each consume as much power as six 60 watt light bulbs, and when idle drop to consuming three 60 watt light bulbs of electricity. So, if this weekend they can turn off half the machines, they’ll save one hundred fifty 60 watt light bulbs of electricity. This project is implemented by Jason Banfelder, Vanessa Borcherding, and Luis Gracia at Cornell Weill Medical University, and this team can tell their parents this holiday weekend that yes we did turn off the lights in the office when we left the office. Actually, when they left the servers were probably at 100% utilization, and as jobs completed idling servers, they were turned off.

Cornell built this in production using dell servers and OSIsoft’s PI system, so don’t think of the idea of turning off servers as a research project

Green Typing Using the Dvorak Keyboard

February 25, 2009 Dave Ohara

Typing is more and more prevalent in society.

So, what is a greener way to type?

One of the projects I managed at Apple was keyboards and mice, so being a keyboard geek my engineer introduced me to the Dvorak keyboard. Also, I had an ergonomics background from my Industrial Engineering education so trying a better ergonomic keyboard seemed worth the effort.

What is a Dvorak keyboard?

The Dvorak Keyboard
!   @   #   $   %   ^   &   *   (   )   [   +
1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   0   ]   =

 "   <   >   P   Y   F   G   C   R   L   ?

'   ,   .   p   y   f   g   c   r   l   /

   A   O   E   U   I   D   H   T   N   S   _

a   o   e   u   i   d   h   t   n   s   -

    :   Q   J   K   X   B   M   W   V   Z

;   q   j   k   x   b   m   w   v   z
The Dvorak keyboard, named for its inventor, Dr. August Dvorak, was designed with the goal of maximizing typing efficiency. For over a century, typists have been using the qwerty keyboard arrangement, a hack that was implemented to work around the mechanical limitations of early typewriters.

Why type Dvorak? The following is a personal web site from an ex-MIT student, Jeff Bigler.

Having heard Dvorak's claims, but not the modern-day scientific analysis of his experiments, I decided to switch to the Dvorak layout in the late 1980s, when computer software (specifically version 10 of the X Window System) made it fairly simple to remap the keyboard layout without making any hardware changes. It took a few months for my Dvorak speed to catch up to my qwerty speed. I found the Dvorak layout to be more comfortable and less effort.

For a period of four or five years, I used the qwerty layout at work (on a shared DOS computer), and the Dvorak layout at home, spending about half of my typing time on each. During that time, my Dvorak speed increased to 90 wpm, and my qwerty speed reached 80 wpm. My accuracy improved slightly on both layouts. On the Dvorak layout, my most common typos are reversing two letters, whereas on the qwerty layout, it's more common for me to hit the wrong key altogether. (Note also that several people have made the claim that it's impossible to be able to switch back and forth between different keyboard layouts. That certainly hasn't been my experience, and I'm always happy to demonstrate for non-believers.)

The greatest benefit I've found from the Dvorak layout is that, in addition to feeling more comfortable, the typing-related discomfort I was beginning to experience in my wrists and forearms diminished, even though the amount of typing I was doing remained constant. Once my workplace switched from DOS to Windows and I was able to use the Dvorak layout everwhere, those problems vanished and have not returned. I believe that Dvorak's claims that his layout requires less "hurdling" over keys and less total finger travel are true, and that this is more or less directly responsible for the reduction in RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) symptoms that I have experienced.

Other advantages besides being more efficient.

Was making the switch worth it? Yes, because of the ergonomic benefits.

Would I recommend it to other people? Yes, particularly if you have RSI problems from typing. When you first make the switch, the unfamiliar layout will slow you down, helping your injured arms and wrists heal. Once your Dvorak speed catches up with your qwerty speed (which it eventually will), you will likely find typing more comfortable (or at least less uncomfortable), and it may be less likely that your RSI will recur.

After 20 + years typing Dvorak, I am glad I made the switch and I have a good ROI on the effort.

One of other benefit of Dvorak, is it is a great security feature. Can you imagine someone trying to logon to your machine entering a password where the keys are remapped? Whenever I have tech support logon to my machine by remote access, I need to change the keyboard type so they can type.

Typing on a Dvorak keyboard is more efficient, better ergonomically, and more secure - a better sustainable typing experence. You just need to be willing to change your typing habits.