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Smarter power grids
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ratcni01
ratcni01
916 posts

Re: Smarter power grids
May 17, 2008, 10:02
At work where I've recently gone part time (can't help but mention that again!) we're doing a sort of smarter computing

We're going down the virtualisation route - and this means. That rather than having a big server with fans, chucking out heat, just doing some footling little job. They're gonna stick all these "little" servers onto big real-world servers as virtual servers, effectively pretending to be a real server. These virtual servers all coexist on the host real-world server, sharing out it's RAM and processor power as and when needed, so you can have like 6 or more virtual servers on one real server, 1/6 of the power comsumption, air con costs etc. Smart!

There's an even smarter bit. The real world host servers are set up in clusters together and share RAM and CPU across a load of them, so when it's quiet at night and demand for CPU and RAM is low. All these virtual servers get shifted onto just a few of the collection of hosts and the ones now not doing anything get powered down, saving more power and more air con costs.

They're looking at doing the same thing with disk space too, servers that get allocated big areas of disk space, if they aren't using the disk space it'll get taken away, until it's needed, and unused disks will get powered down, even more electricity and air con costs being saved.

Know it's a bit geeky, and being invloved in setting some of this up appeals to my inner geek, but it is actually quite cool - imo
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