One of the racks in our machine room

While perhaps not as impressive as the grocery store-size aisles of a supercomputer like the Earth Simulator (which was recently rated as the world’s most computationally-effficient supercomputer), our servers do suck their share of power. The two most significant energy inputs to this system are the cooling unit and the UPS (uninterruptible power supply).

Imagine your hair blowing in an arctic wind

Just a few hundred pounds of batteries

We have a system that monitors the power used by both the UPS and the cooling unit, and we’ve been performing measurements since February. Recently, we added a routine that calculates daily consumption for the current month. The plan is to put this information on the IMA Dashboard, and we’re using this opportunity to try out Google Charts.

Current IT power consumption for July

One of the key survival tools for anyone on the quest for sustainability is measurement. From the data we have here, it appears that we have a baseline of about 1300kWh per day. Knowing this, when we swap out hardware in the future we will be able to determine how much of an improvement we actually make, as opposed to relying on theoretical figures.

Of course, we’d like to be confident that our measurements are correct. In order to do this, we’re using Kill-A-Watt devices to measure power input on individual components in the rack. If the measurements are correct, the total power calculated from sampling individual units should be approximately equal to the power measured by the monitoring system. If not, we’ll have some investigating to do.

Tapping into a couple servers

Tapping into the main line

Hopefully, our measurements will validate and we’ll soon have live data up on the Dashboard. Until then, check out some other fancy energy usage dashboards.