Intel Tips High Density data center energy saving

Oil exploration simulation requires a large scale high-performance computing cluster, but also the need to consume a lot of electricity. In recent years, with the increasing of the breadth, depth and precision of oil exploration and reservoir simulation, the scale of the server in the data center of oil enterprise is expanding. June 27, Intel in Mongolia http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/30943.html "> Hohhot held a theme for" Green computing from the ' core ' start " China Petroleum industry and Intel 2008 High Performance Computing seminar. At the meeting, the representative of PetroChina provided such a message that in 2006 the company's data center spent a total of 4.9 million yuan in electricity, and in 2007, the spending climbed to 7.9 million yuan, expected to reach 13 million yuan in 2008. How to reduce the cost of energy consumption under the premise of ensuring the continuous expansion of the data center has become a topic of common concern from users to it vendors.

In general, the increase in data center energy efficiency needs from the server and other IT equipment and data center two levels, such as in the server, you can use a higher performance per watt server, the use of virtualization for server consolidation, start the server energy savings, through the application of optimization to improve the capacity of a single system, In the improvement of the data center, we can improve the air supply, adopt a new heat transfer system, and adopt the novel computer room design and so on. To this end, Yan, China regional technology manager at Intel Solutions, said Intel would provide product technology and methodologies from chips, components, systems, and the entire data center to help users reduce energy consumption in their data centers.

Server level

Specific to the power distribution of the server, according to statistics, the processor consumes 30% of the energy, followed by memory and disk respectively accounted for 11% and 6%. In addition, DC/DC conversion will lose 25% of 10%,AC/DC loss and fan account for 9%.

Yan said that at this level Intel offers many ways to improve energy efficiency, including low-voltage version processors, chip-level energy-saving technologies, high-density motherboards, SSD solid-state disk technology, dynamic Power node Manager, and so on.

1 Low voltage version of the processor

At present, Intel is selling the promoted low voltage version of 50W 45 nm 5400, although the price will be more expensive than the corresponding normal Xeon 5400, but it can maintain consistent performance under the premise of providing lower power consumption. In general, the low voltage version of the Xeon 5400 than the ordinary CPU to save 30 watts of electricity, reduce power consumption of 35%. This may not be a big thing for a server, but the amount of energy saved in a single year is considerable for the number of servers up to hundreds of or even thousands of data centers.

2 Reduce CPU idle power

Because the idle power consumption of the CPU in the sleep and shutdown state does not produce any production value, the chip maker has been trying to reduce the power expenditure. Even strong 5400 LV For example, its idle power is only 16 watts, and the previous generation of 65 nm products is about 30 watts.

3 Turbo mode chip level power regulation

In the next generation of Nehalem processors, Intel will also introduce a turbo mode technology that, when power conditions permit, heavy application software can automatically follow predefined steps to increase the processor's frequency to meet current processing needs. Turbo mode can take full advantage of the processor's energy footprint. Because, in multi-core processors, not all cores are in a load-activated state, and not all activated cores run in full power, so all the extra power space is converted to the higher frequencies of other active cores.

For example, suppose a quad-core processor is designed to consume 80 watts, when two of these cores are activated and the other two are idle, it is possible to use only 40 watts, or 40 watts of residual power, so that turbo mode allows the machine to automatically lift the frequency of the two activated cores to a level of 80 watts. So that the job can be completed in the shortest amount of time, and then the CPU will return to the idle state with less power consumption.

The timing of the system in Turbo mode depends on the load, and Turbo mode can be activated or turned off in the BIOS and then invoked in the operating system.