It was business as usual on DETER's server cluster in the
University of Southern California during the July heat wave —
but the cluster was using 30 percent less power.
With power shortages looming up and down the state, DETER
programmer Kevin Lahey took action.
"With the possibility of Stage 3 Power Alerts on Tuesday, our
DETER collaborators at UC Berkeley shut down their 100
nodes to save power.
Not to be outdone, we deployed a system we've been
working on lately to
turn off the unused nodes on the testbed.
"We managed to save around 100A this way. Unfortunately,
this won't
really do much to prevent the sorts of overload problems
we've been
seeing, since the nodes will power on and boot up whenever
a user
requests them. The potential maximum load for the testbed
is just as
high as ever -- we're only reducing the amount of power
we're using at
any one time.
"We probably won't wind up using this new system over the
long term, as we're not sure about the effect on the
longevity of our servers, but we
thought that it was an appropriate measure to take in the
short term."
Makeshift and non-permanent as the adjustment was, it
produced an immediate reaction from the building
management of the ISI office towers. DETER director Terry
Benzel reported a call, asking why power consumption had
gone down so far.
 |
