> Energy cost will massively grow within this and next decade because of > decreasing oil and gas supply and rapidly growing electricity demand.
I'm not sure where you get this. in north america, for instance, there has been a fairly dramat increase in available energy (from new sources of natural gas, mainly), while electrical demand has been *falling* for years (at least in my part of Canada). > For the time from 2008 until 2030 the electricity comsumption growth > of all our ICT infrastructures has been predicted by a factor of 30 well, on the one hand, that's a 1.2% compounded growth rate, which seems reasonably low. on the other hand, only a complete ass would believe anyone can predict such numbers >20 years in the future. than again, I'm at least as uncertain about what "ICT infrastructure" means. > --- if current trends continue. Also the price per kWh will probably grow > by another factor, I hope so. energy is far too cheap to discourage its use, and our environment suffers badly as a consequence. > so that the electricity cost to run our ICT > infrastructures > may grow by a factor of 100 or even more during this period of time. I assume you mean "by 100%" rather than "by a factor of 100x" - this would imply that the cost of power more than triples. that would surprise me a lot, given that power prices (wholesale, at least) have decreased over the past decade. it's also true that ICT has gotten dramatically more efficient in the past few years - sometimes in absolute numbers, but certainly in constant-workload comparisons. I'm not really talking about escascale here - that's a prestige thing, driven by political, not engineering concerns (I'm pretty sceptical about imputed scientific motives, too.) > We need your ideas on how to cope with this challenge by current trends. I think the industry is doing well on its own, though higher power prices would provide more encouragement. currently, it costs roughly 10% of the capital cost of a server to run it at 100% for a year (here, at least). most sane IT environments plan for 3-ish years of service, so that's 30%, and counting a mediocre PUE of 1.3, so let's call the total power component a doubling of cost. that's certainly big enough to affect planning processes, even accelerated obsolescence. (suppose, for instance, that even a generic server, 2 years later, performs 4x faster at the same power and price.) in short, yes there are new mega-datacenters out there, but they are causing a lot of consolidation - elimination of crappy old PUE 3.0 datacenters with racks of big/fat 4U servers and missing blanking panels in favor of decently packed multi-tenant VM hosts. that trend is basically irrelevant for HPC, our clusters are usually already airflow-optimized, fully-utilized, etc. regards, mark hahn. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
