Oolite Bulletins

In an effort to reduce my lab's carbon footprint we've been running some experiments that may be of interest to some.

Each student slot consists of:

2x 17" 1280x1024 LCD monitors
1x powered stereo speakers (10W) with powered sub-woofer (100W)
1x i7-920, 4GB RAM, 500GB SATA drive, 1GB XFX Black Edition GTX285, matched XFX Black Edition 650W single 12V power-rail silver 80plus PSU.

Power usage figures as follows:

1. PC in "standby", speakers on, Monitors set to "sleep" (which will become our overnight standard as of this week as it requires no physical button pressing - which, with 100 PCs were trying to avoid - and it can be done via central software control): 10W

2. PC running, logged in, no apps running except XP, monitors "sleep", speakers on: 150W

3. PC running, logged in, no apps running except XP, monitors on, speakers on: 170W

4. PC being "thrashed" (VBS2, Furmark, 3D Mark, SANDRA - not at the same time!), Monitors on, Speaker on: 320-370W (ave. over 1hr = 350W)

As we have 100 "stations" - we're going to save a lot of power overnight as we're currently running in state 2. and we're dropping down to state 1.

that's some canny set-up for a student like! what do they study there, are they writing stuff for you or testing scenarios and stuff?

Killer Wolf wrote:

that's some canny set-up for a student like! what do they study there, are they writing stuff for you or testing scenarios and stuff?

The team I work in is tasked to "educate" anybody in the MOD (Military or Civilian) about any modelling or simulation that is, or could be used within the MOD (I am much more expert on some than others!). The machine I spec'd is our best "standard" machine (we have others, a few P4-3.2s with 768MB 8800GTXs, some Core 2 E6600 with 640MB 8800GTS and 20x Core 2 Quads also with GTX285s) - the 3D "gaming" apps (such as VBS2) eat the graphics cards, others such as our CGFs (such as JSAF and OneSAF) will multi-thread and eat the CPUs (especially if you're generating 10s of thousands of AI entities) and if you're building large and/or complex terrains in something like TerraVista then 4GB is the bare minimum - we have a few machines that specialise in this that have 16GB fitted and 2TB drives (but not for the students generally) - we wanted to get to the point that any PC in the lab could run any app (some better than others), so no matter what config the MOD asked for, we could cope. (it's still not true, but the percentages are getting better!)

Thanks for providing that info. As a fellow geek that kind of stuff is nice to read. I'm sure you predicted figures like that, but to actually do the testing and see that it really is your true power draw is nice info indeed.

I'm not sure why your machines were in state 2 to start with, as a basic power management policy could have put the machines to sleep after a period of inactivity. Machines of that calibre will not take long to wake up

I don't know how practical this suggestion is, but if you are trying to save the planet investing in some of those remote control power of power strips may be a possibility. Have the speakers and the monitors plugged into them only. With all the strips running on the same remote frequency with a single push of the button per room you may be able to batch turn off all the speakers and monitors. Not sure if saving those last few watts will be worth the effort and expense, could be worth running the figures though.

I don't think plugging the actual computers into them would be a good idea. As sooner or later you are going to get a comedian who hits on the right remote frequency and turns off the whole damn lab, losing everyone's work. At least if you do have a student who is of that nature all that happens is a temporary interruption.

"(especially if you're generating 10s of thousands of AI entities)"

crikey, what are simulating, a war against mutated ants? or is it the potential zombie holocaust?

State 2 was because until this week we'd lost our locally run AV Server so we were relying on individual licenses and the machines were all updating fairly randomly overnight. However, the University has pulled its finger out, got us our Corporate licence for Symantec back and we've got it running happily across the lab with one of our servers monitoring the AV scan and update process on each of the machines - when it's done - they're remotely pushed into Standby mode and the monitors put to sleep.

Given we have a completely open policy about memory sticks and the like, every machine having up to date AV software is a must - and we've been very nervous for about a year while waiting for the Uni to sort out our lapsed (their fault) Central Server license - which is why the Uni has given up on McAfee and gone back to Symantec.

Killer Wolf wrote:

"(especially if you're generating 10s of thousands of AI entities)"

crikey, what are simulating, a war against mutated ants? or is it the potential zombie holocaust?

Urban Civilian clutter/pattern of life - we're fighting very asymmetrical wars at the moment...

DaddyHoggy wrote:

State 2 was because until this week we'd lost our locally run AV Server so we were relying on individual licenses and the machines were all updating fairly randomly overnight. However, the University has pulled its finger out, got us our Corporate licence for Symantec back and we've got it running happily across the lab with one of our servers monitoring the AV scan and update process on each of the machines - when it's done - they're remotely pushed into Standby mode and the monitors put to sleep.

Given we have a completely open policy about memory sticks and the like, every machine having up to date AV software is a must - and we've been very nervous for about a year while waiting for the Uni to sort out our lapsed (their fault) Central Server license - which is why the Uni has given up on McAfee and gone back to Symantec.

Ah yes, it all starts to make sense now, that would have been an administrative nightmare, as you would never truly know if the AV was up to date or not.

Having dealt with similar issues when I was working for a Native American health care system, you may be interested in the solution we found for PC power management. As you likely know, power management settings are not per-machine (as would make sense) but are per-user on Windows. This makes making any sort of power management very troublesome as many users will not have sufficient privileges to change the settings on the PC.

After some research, I found EZ GPO. If the XP machines are part of a Domain, you may want to take a look.

All our machines have a single user account which has local admin rights - the rest is handled by the domain controller...

However, thanks for the info and the program you mentioned will be investigated!