Every time I walk down the rows of servers in a data center, I wonder, what percentage are doing something and what percentage are idle. For efficiency sake, turning off unused servers seems like a good idea because even when doing nothing, they use quite a bit of power. It is also not too difficult to configure some schedulers to shutdown nodes when not in use. But when one looks at how some clusters are purchased, you can understand why more attention is not given to power management.
HPC Turn-Offs: Power Control
February 24, 2010