[Aurora-sparc-user] Electric cost for E4500 12CPU/9GB Memory

[kab33 at charter.net]

Hi

Someone here recommended the "Kill a Watt P4400" electric meter (ebay 
for $25).  I got one. It is really neat.  I knew my E4500 was a power 
pig, but here is the cost of it:

Up to a $1.90 PER DAY for electricity.  Read on . . .

The configuration is  E4500 with only one power supply plugged in. 
It has 1 I/O board with two scsi Sbus cards but I am not using them; 
another I/O board with a PCI 4 port 10/100 Ethernet card for one 
100Mbps LAN.  The 9GB system disk is installed with the DVD drive in 
the front scsi tray.  This E4500 has 12 CPUs of 400Mhz some have 8MB 
buffers, some have 4MB. It has 9 GB of ram.  Aurora 2.0 is installed.

I set up a 4.9G ramdisk and loaded source for a kernel compile.  I 
put the commands:
make clean
make -j12 vmlinux
make -j12 modules

in a loop that has been repeating now for almost 20 hours.  The 
.config for this compile is a slightly modified version of the SMP 
config file that is in /boot for Aurora.   Xosview, vncserver running 
KDE, and what ever  generic Aurora kicks off are also running during 
this time.

For reference, it takes 10 Minutes and 26 seconds to clean and 
compile the kernel and modules with -j12!

A resulting Kernel is :
Linux version 2.6.13-puff (root at E4500-Q12) (gcc version 3.4.2 
20041017 (Red Hat 3.4.2-6.fc3)) #211 SMP Sat Feb 10 21:43:43 CST 2007
Note the #211   Also, "-puff",  because Spot seems to be taken :-))) 
[anyone here know what Spot and Puff come from? :-)] Hint:  See Spot 
run.  See Puff chase the red balloon . . .

The Kill-a-Watt shows the E4500 taking just over 9Amps idle and about 
9.5Amps when compiling.  In 19h and 24mins it sucked 20.67 kWh of 
electric.  At 6.96 cents per kWh here in St. Louis (I think), its 
going to cost me $1.80 (idle) to $1.90 a day or up to $695 a year to 
run the beast!  Ouch.  That is over 3 times my costs for this puppy. 
I guess I won't be leaving it on all the time!!  It does keep the 
basement nice a warm, however!

It is interesting  the difference between idle and compile (which top 
and xosview both show taking 100% of all CPUs) is just 10 cents  per 
day (or 1/2 Amp on the Kill-a-Watt display).  I guess compiles do not 
really task the CPU for additional power.

If someone has a script or code that really cause the CPUs to pull 
power, email me and I'll set it up for a test (oh, and send some 
cash! too - just kidding).

For a 12 CPU compile screenshoot see:

http://fredfast.homeip.net/E4500screen.png

Keith
kab33 at charter dot net

PS My kids thought it was pretty neat to us the Kill-a-Watt to 
measure how much it took to cook some hot dogs for lunch - it was 
just over 1 cent!  Now they want to measure everything.  Once they 
do, I'll start charging them to run the Xbox 360!!!  Knowledge is 
Power (pun intended)!!



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