Hippy Green

This past Thursday April 5, I attended the Google NYC Office for a tech talk with Luiz Barroso’s on “Watts, Faults, and Other Fascinating Dirty Words Computer Architects Can No Longer Afford to Ignore”. He discussed various energy problems and concerns that Google is facing along with ideas and ways to solve them.

Google has many data centers with racks of computers. Each computer has at least 1 power supply for power. Most data centers use at least 2 of everything to be redundant incase something fails. Efficiency can play a major role in not only saving money but also being environmentally friendly. If a power supply for 1 computer in a data center only 50% efficient then 50% of the energy used to power this 1 computer in a data center goes to waste. Most data centers have hundreds of racks of computers. Each rack holds about 42 1u cases or 42 computers. This could vary in setup but a data center contains hundreds if not thousands of computers.

Using energy efficient power supplies can cut down on the cost and the waste of power. During the talk, Barroso points out that a computer server could cost less then the power that it uses over the course of its life. Most computer servers last about 4 years and the power required to keep it up and running would cost more then the server. He also points out that the energy used while the server is idle and not processing anything is about 10 to 20% less then when the server is at full peak processing.

How many computers to do you leave on at your home? Do they have a efficient power supply?