Energy Management vs. Power Management in the Data Center, Take 2

I would like to elaborate on the topic energy vs. power management in my previous entry.

Upgrading the electrical power infrastructure to accommodate additional servers is not an option in most data centers today.There are two types of potentially useful figures of merit, one for power management and one for energy management.To understand the dynamic between power and energy management let&aposs look at the graph below and imagine a server without any power management mechanisms whatsoever.t is P(actual)(t).t(1) through t(2) yields the energy saved.Please note that a mechanism that yields significant power savings may not necessarily yield high energy savings.Another useful figure of merit for power management is the dynamic range for power proportional computing.The relationship is not always linear, but the figure illustrates the concept.If a 50 percent P(baseline) looks outstanding, we can do even better for certain application environments such as load-balanced front end Web server pools and the implementation of cloud services through clustered, virtualized servers.platooning.In the figure below note that each platoon is defined by the application of a specific technology or state within eachThe CPU is not running in any of the S-states than S0.A virtualized environment makes it easier to rebalance workloads across active (unconstrained and power capped) servers.The extra dynamic power range comes at the expense of instituting additional processes and operational complexity.HS22 blade servers versus the HS20 model only three years old.Network World reports a similar figure, a ten-fold increase in performance, not just ten percent.I will be elaborating on some of these ideas at the PDCS Cloud Power Management with the Intel(r) Nehalem Platform class at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco on the week of September 20th.

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Talented kids & multi-core: Adding fuel to the mix

Now I can add orchestra leader to my list of job roles at Intel. I’ve been conducting an ensemble of talented players from across industry, education and within Intel to orchestrate the first High School Parallelism Boot-camp. I’ve been crafting the flow of topics & lab activities, developing some new ways to convey parallelism topics using role play, coordinating with luminaries & Intel engineers. I’ve been rounding up & testing content & systems for months now. Now all that work is about to pay off next week in the first ever (as far as I know) High School Parallelism boot-camp hosted at Brooklyn Technical High School and sponsored by Intel, Bank of America, Blade Network & IBM.

Warning – new metaphor coming…

We are about to embark on a journey. A journey to the future. A future defined by the many-core era.

To take us on the journey – we need fuel. The fuel mix for this journey consists of four ingredients: multi-core hardware, parallelism training, great instructors and the fertile minds of bright high school students. We are about to light the mix off in a controlled burn next week (July 21-23) at the campus of Brooklyn Tech HS. A couple dozen HS students and faculty will participate in this hands-on parallel programming training event. We will be laying out the challenge to begin thinking in parallel and arming the students with three patterns that can be used to think about parallel problems. Then we will arm them with a couple of methods to implement parallel software on many-core HW. We will discuss some of the challenges unique to parallel programming and ways to address these challenges using SW tools & new ways of thinking. Then we will show them just of few of the possibilities – a few compelling SW demos that show how “real” a virtual world powered by multi-core systems can be. Along the way we hope to arm them knowledge of how to leverage many-core systems that are headed our way. Hopefully we will refine our mixture as we learn from these students & faculty how to better equip young minds.

I guess I want to extend James Reinder’s point and say that today high schools & colleges are either teaching “the history of programming” or they are teaching parallel programming. I am excited to work with Brooklyn Technical High school and their principal, Randy Asher, who are doing something about teaching to the FUTURE.  I am also proud to work with folks like Jeff Birnbaum (Bank of America) who was the inspiration & prime motivation for making this project happen.

Stand back, put your safety goggles on – we’re about to light the mixture.

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/IntelBlogs/~3/GDuQZzyfzKQ/

Parallel programming is fundamental, High School here we come

Teaching programming and teaching parallel programming – should they be different?

I don&apost think so.

We&aposve always had many elements to teach when we teach programming – data structures, algorithms, databases, parsing, scheduling, etc. Parallelism is yet-another item to throw on the list of things to teach as part of programming.

With the introduction of multicore processors, it was obvious to me that parallelism would soon be a part of every system. We&aposre pretty much there now.

However – parallel programming remains an advanced topic in graduate studies and notably absent from too many undergraduate courses.  Yes – we are making progress, and Intel&aposs academic program is a major contributor to helping professors with material, ideas and sharing with like-minded professors.  But, it seems all too slow for me.

Actions speak louder than words.

Next week, I&aposll be at Brooklyn Technical High School helping teach parallelism to top notch high school students and some of their high school teachers. The learning will be both directions.

If parallel programming is fundamental to programming, then we need to figure out what aspects of it belong in high school. I&aposm confident we will figure it out, and this is an important step.

I plan to write some follow-ups based on the experiences as they happen. For now, I want to thank Randy Asher + Brooklyn Technical High School, Jeff Birnbaum + Bank of America, IBM (a 48-core system!!!), Blade Network Technologies and Intel for underwriting this effort and having the faith that &aposparallel programming is fundamental.&apos

I&aposll also do an interview and discuss the experience afterwards with the Intel program &aposTeach Parallel&apos  – although probably not on July 28 as currently scheduled. Before then, you can catch Jeff and Randy on July 21 talking about our plans.

Wish us luck, and stay tuned for our notes on what works and what does not.

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