By IANS,
Washington : Putting servers to sleep when they’re idle is part of an University of Michigan plan to save up to 75 percent of energy that power-hungry computer data centres consume.
Data centres, central to cyber infrastructure, house computing, networking and storage equipment. Each time you make an ATM withdrawal, search the Internet or make a cell phone call, your request is routed through a data centre.
Thomas Wenisch, assistant professor in electrical engineering and computer science, and students David Meisner and Brian Gold analysed data centre workloads and power consumption and used mathematical modelling to develop their approach.
“For the typical industrial data centre, the average utilisation is 20 to 30 percent. The computers are spending about four-fifths of their time doing nothing,” Wenisch said.
“And the way we build these computers today, they’re still using 60 percent of peak power even when they’re doing nothing,” he added.
The approach includes PowerNap, the plan to put idle servers to sleep, and RAILS, a more efficient power supplying technique. RAILS stands for Redundant Array for Inexpensive Load Sharing.
The US government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) expects the energy consumption of the nation’s data centres to exceed 100 billion kWh by 2011, for an annual electricity cost of $7.4 billion.
Those figures are about twice what they were in 2006, when data centres already drew more electricity than 5.8 million US households.
Data centres waste most of the energy they draw. The facilities are inefficient because they must be ready for peak processing demands much higher than the average demand, said a Michigan release.
They would have to slumber and wake exceedingly fast, Wenisch said. His detailed analysis of 600 servers illustrates the sporadic and sparse demands on data centre servers.
The researchers will be presenting a paper on this subject March 10 at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems in Washington.