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

[Bill Richter]

Try Seti at home <mailto:Seti at home> 
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download_all.php
 
Good for 100% on all 4 cpus on my RHAS box, 2 dual core Intel CPUs.
 

--
Thanks.

Bill Richter
  

-----Original Message-----
From: aurora-sparc-user-bounces at lists.auroralinux.org
[mailto:aurora-sparc-user-bounces at lists.auroralinux.org] On Behalf Of
kab33 at charter.net
Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2007 9:05 PM
To: aurora-sparc-user at lists.auroralinux.org
Subject: [Aurora-sparc-user] Electric cost for E4500 12CPU/9GB Memory


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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