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Cloud computing involves displacing data storage and processing from the user's computer on to remote servers. It can provide users with more storage space and computing power that they can then access from anywhere in the world rather than having to connect to a single desktop or other computer with its finite resources. However, some observers have raised concerns about the increased energy demands of sustaining distributed servers and having them up and running continuously, where an individual user's laptop might be shut down when it is not in use or the resources utilization of the server is less than the lower threshold, for instance.
Now, writing in the International Journal of Information Technology, Communications and Convergence, researchers at the University of Oran in Algeria, have investigated how cloud computing systems might be optimized for energy use and to reduce their carbon footprint. Jouhra Dad and Ghalem Belalem in the Department of Computer Science at Oran explain how they have developed an algorithm to control the virtual machines running on computers in a cloud environment so that energy use of the core central processing units (CPUs) and memory capacity (RAM as opposed to hard disk storage space) can be reduced as far as possible without affecting performance overall.
Unfortunately, there is little detailed information on the algorithm itself in the article.
I suspect some Soylents have home servers which they access from within their home as well as remotely. What, if anything, do you do to reduce your energy costs?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 14 2014, @12:29AM
how does that compare with the throughput of a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black?
would you trade 37MB/sec at 11 watts for 20MB/sec at 5 watts?
(Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Sunday September 14 2014, @03:21AM
Hey, that's not a very fair comparison.
The nominal power consumption of a Raspberry Pi model B is AIUI 3.5W (700mA, 5V) without peripherals (model A is less), and the Beaglebone Black is something like 2.5W (500mA, 5V) with no peripherals (the manual says peak consumption during boot is 460mA with HDMI, ethernet, USB hub, and USB flash drive connected) -- a 5W minimum PSU is commonly recommended for either board, to allow for powering some peripherals as well, and is in both cases probably more than enough for a headless NAS (assuming disk power is considered separately).
The 11W TDP for the P3-based Celeron, OTOH, is just the CPU -- not only are peripherals not included, but neither is the chipset.
So for a fair comparison, we either need to increase 11W to a reasonable whole-board or whole-system power consumption for the Celeron, or to substantially reduce the 5W figure.
(Score: 2) by gallondr00nk on Sunday September 14 2014, @07:33AM
I wasn't really comparing it to anything - A RPi with a decent power supply, powered hub and two external hard drive caddies would use a lot less power for sure.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday September 14 2014, @11:10AM
And Foobar Bazbot wasn't replying to you.
Try the parent link next time (or adjust your settings so that no posts are completely hidden).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by gallondr00nk on Sunday September 14 2014, @11:04PM
Fucking hell, I never even knew I didn't see modded down replies.
Thanks :)