INDUSTRY INTELLIGENCE POWERED BY THE DCA
Data traffic has been growing at 60% CAGR for the past 15 years
and the hardware capacity at 50% CAGR, such that data centre
loads have grown at only 10% CAGR.
at only 10% CAGR. There is now plenty of
evidence that data traffic has flattened
out in mature markets, including the UK,
and data centre energy is stabilising for
the moment – but that’s another story. The SPEC Power test regimes do not
represent all loads (or any specific) but
as a benchmark are very informative,
although, as usual, ‘there are other test
routines available’ etc.
So how far and quickly have
servers developed? For example, we can use SPEC to compare
two servers that are both in service
today but about six years apart in market
release date. I will call them Server-A and
Server-B, although you can make your
own comparisons by looking at the SPEC
listings for free.
A good source of server performance
data is the SPEC website where several
hundred servers are listed by the OEMs,
along with their performance against the
SPEC Power software loading routines.
that the lower limit for idle power in
silicon chips would be 20%, but Server-B
managed 13% (44W) in 2017.
So, Server-B (not hugely different in
purchase cost to Server-A) can, on power
consumption alone, replace at least
270 modules of Server-A, a remarkable
consolidation of 40 ICT cabinets into one.
However, when Server-A was released, it
was a very popular machine and offered
huge performance compared to what went
before it and at a lower cost. I remember
seeing a HPC installation in the UK handling
datasets for oil and gas exploration surveys
using Server-A but I would assume that
Server-A had a rated power consumption
at 100% SPEC load of 394W and
performed 26,880 operations per second
– which resulted in 45 Operations/Watt.
Its idle power (when doing no work at
all) was 226W which is a surprising
57%, although that compared to some
other servers of the time idled at a rather
depressing 79%.
Ian Bitterlin of Critical Facilities Consulting
22
Issue 12
In comparison, Server-B has a rated power
consumption at 100% SPEC load of 329W
(17% lower) and performs 4,009,213
operations per second (88,000x more) –
which results in 12,212 Operations/Watt
(270x more). Roughly five years ago, a
whitepaper was written which predicted
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