Exploring The Green Blade

Ken LutzUniversity of California, Berkeley

LoCal Retreat, June 8, 2009

Motivation

2

• To Realize An Energy Responsive Blade and Cluster– Consolidate Load within the cluster– Turn OFF Underutilized Blades

– Explore a smaller unit of replication

– Run on Battery providing Demand Response• Platform for System Level Experiments

3

Server Power Consumption

230

15

248

87

190

13

190

13

200

14

161

19

287

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Server Power Consumption

Active

Idle

Maybe we can explore a new data point

ATOM Blade

• Explore a New Building Block• Inexpensive ($100) and Low Power (25W)• Based on the Intel ATOM 330 CPU

– Dual Core – 45nm– 8W MAX

• Smaller Unit of Replication so expect a cluster will have more units to do the same work

• Fine Grain Control4

Energy Responsive Node

5

Node On/OFF

AC ON/OFF

Battery Backup

UPS Controller ATOM

LoCal ATOM Cluster

• (4) ATOM Motherboards – Almost 1U– 160MB Disk Drive– 10/100 Ethernet– 2GB DRAM– USB etc– DC-DC converter with UPS switch and Battery

• Where is the power going?

6

Room for Improvement…

7

TV Encoder

Clock Generator

Audio Codec

Dc-DC ConverterBridge Chip

Intel I/O controller hub Chip

ATOM CPU

No Heat Sinks

8Not Steady State

Idle Power

9

CPU Power Control Schemes may have a limited effect

Conclusion

• The goal is to explore a new data point in cluster design

• Small nodes allow fine grained load distribution

• Ability to turn nodes off• Explore limited but distributed energy

storage• Learn about the system level problems

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