[6182] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Athena Release Team 1/21/09 Notes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Thu Jan 22 18:09:19 2009
Cc: "andrew m. boardman" <amb@mit.edu>, Bill Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>,
release-team@mit.edu
Message-Id: <D2194E7D-B1C3-401D-AC5D-87B831AEC9F6@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <200901222234.n0MMYMKH002468@yaz-pistachio.mit.edu>
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Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:08:36 -0500
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*shrug*.
I made the rounds of most of the main group clusters today, and
investigated a bunch of machines. Interestingly enough, the vast
majority of broken machines in W20 seem to be WIN.MIT.EDU machines,
but that's another issue.
Once I began training myself to look at the power LED and not the LCD,
I find it's not a big deal. Of the downed machines I found, some
were stuck in BIOS errors where the screen isn't off, and others were
just plain off. I found one machine that had screenblanked and had an
error, but it was in console mode (caused by unplugged network cable)
and console mode screenblanking was already enabled before this change
(or rather, we never disabled it).
The calculations were made based on the standby power consumption vs
active power consumption, based on numbers from the LCD manufacturers
websites. The Dell 2009WFP consumes 70W in active mode and 2W in
standby mode. That's a huge difference. I mean, it's possible
they're making the numbers up, but it seems unikely.
Before the change, we debated whether or not we needed to notify end
users of the change. The consensus was "Wait and see". It sounds
like this is an argument for putting up some posters, telling users to
press a key, check the power LED, and if all else fails, e-mail hotline.
-Jon
On Jan 22, 2009, at 5:34 PM, Mitchell E Berger wrote:
>> I just noticed this, which I don't remember discussing but may have
>> forgotten:
>>
>>> We deployed the power saving code. No complaints so far.
>>
>> My initial anecdotal experience is poor; on Tuesday, I sat down in
>> front
>> of a machine in 1-115 which turned out to need some help. I've also
>> heard verbal complaints from people who would once have noticed and
>> potentially fixed borked cluster machines but now can't.
>>
>> I'm currently unconvinced of the value of this change. Is the energy
>> savings worth the extra time hotline is going to need to spend on
>> maintenance? (I realize it's also a done deal and unlikely to be
>> readdressed. But if you're soliciting complaints, well, here you
>> go.)
>
> Likewise. There would have been a major difference in energy
> consumption
> back in the days of all CRTs, but now that we're so LCD heavy, I think
> we've given up more than we're gaining by doing this. I certainly
> used
> to pass through clusters when I had a couple minutes and fix
> machines to
> save hotline time (and users time waiting for hotline to notice), and
> now I can't... or at least I'm certainly not going to walk around and
> try to wake up each machine to see if it's okay.
>
> Also, I realize that any savings is theoretically good, but in the
> grand
> scheme of things, $10k a year? We've adjusted all Athena machines
> for what
> would've allowed us to renew just 4 or 5 more boxes at the end of the
> year? I think we'd have a larger number of usable machines if we
> saved
> the $10k by buying 4 or 5 fewer new machines a year and instead
> fixed the
> larger number of machines that we now don't realize are down.
>
> I know, I know, it's not Green.
>
> Mitch
>
