Archive for the ‘IT Impact’ Category

MiserWare Becomes a New AASHE Business Member

Friday, April 26th, 2013

MiserWare, Inc. Deepens Commitment to Sustainability

MiserWare, Inc. has recently become a member of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, an association of colleges and universities working to create a sustainable world. Through its membership in AASHE, MiserWare will be able to better understand and assist higher education institutions in advancing their sustainability initiatives.

“Our green IT software, Granola Enterprise decreases computer energy use by up to 35%, with no impact on performance,” said Erica Putman, head of MiserWare outreach. “If it ran on every computer used in universities nationwide, Granola could cut power bills by millions of dollars, helping higher education communities meet their energy-related sustainability goals. We’re excited to start our membership with AASHE!”

(more…)

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Improve the reliability of your PC

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

TLDR – scale your CPU speed to match demand and your PC will be more reliable.

Microsoft Research has published a very interesting peer reviewed paper where they look at the causes of crashes in over a million consumer PCs. This is the most comprehensive investigation into crashes on home PCs that anyone has ever undertaken. The paper has a bunch of cool findings including what you can do to reduce the chances your PC will crash or die completely.

Apart from hardware completely killing itself, we have all been victims of software crashes. It is easy to blame these on the programmer but sometimes the hardware itself has done something to pull the rug out from under your program. Sometimes it is just an essay you have been working on, but every now and then it is right before your game gets saved.

Microsoft found, after studying the crash reports from more than a million PCs that there are a few things we can do to make our machines live longer. Some people will intuitively have guessed some of these conclusions but this is the first time we have had some facts to back them up.

Overclocking

When Intel or AMD make a CPU they perform a bunch of tests at the factory to choose which clock speed the CPU can reliably run at. You do not have to run your CPU at this manufacturer specced speed though. For years people have been overclocking their CPUs to run faster. When overclocking a CPU you ramp up the speed iteratively until you find a speed which seems to give you system stability. Often you will upgrade cooling or buy a bigger power supply to keep the CPU running at the higher speed. Microsoft found that over an 8 month period a CPU that is overclocked is up to 20 times more likely to have a failure than at a vendor rated speed. Microsoft don’t names names, but one CPU vendor does better when overclocked (figure it out).

Underclocking

People have been wondering if reducing the clock speed of a CPU will make it more reliable. The idea is that reducing the speed means CPUs do not get as hot and require less electricity, the reverse of overclocking. Microsoft found that running your CPU at a lower speed meant machines were up to 80% less likely to crash in the 8 month period.

The paper shows that reducing the CPU speed reduces the failure rate and suggests that you can minimize the likelihood of a CPU crash by operating at the slowest CPU speed to achieve the desired performance.

Matching CPU Speed to System Demand

As Microsoft points out, we PC folks already have a technology in our computers that can control the CPU speed called DVFS. The difficult thing is matching the speed of the CPU to the demand. If you set the speed too low you will be slowing the machine down, if you set it too high then you are needlessly taxing the CPU as well as wasting energy.

MiserWare has a consumer version of its power management software called Granola Personal which was designed to match CPU speed to system demand. We made it primarily to reduce your energy footprint but it will do exactly what Microsoft suggests, set your CPU to the lowest speed it needs to run at.

Download Granola Personal

Granola settings window

Granola is available for PCs running Windows XP-7 and Linux Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian and RHEL. By default after it is installed it will manage your CPU in “MiserWare mode” which will change the CPU speed to match demand. You can also force your CPU to its lowest speed if you wish, using the settings window which looks like the screenshot. Matching your CPU speed to demand has the bonus of saving you some money on your power bill.

If you have a large number of PCs like a university lab and do not want to have to install Granola Personal on every machine there is a simpler to version for you to use. Granola Enterprise (free to try) is designed to be rolled out on large numbers of machines and be centrally managed. You can find out more about it here.

Too Short – Want To Read More

If you find this interesting I highly recommend reading the paper. It has a wealth of cool stuff and technical details.

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Mat

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How effective are your sustainability efforts?

Friday, June 15th, 2012

TL;DR: Turn off your computer when you aren’t using it and you can buy a goat. There’s some other stuff too, but that’s the most important part.

There are a plethora of posts about ways to improve your energy footprint in your home. The suggestions usually run from the obvious (turn stuff off) to the drastic (get a $1500 energy audit). Unfortunately, many of these articles are a little shy on the actual benefits you could expect from implementing these measures. For example, which should you do first: change your lightbulbs to CFLs or start using a programmable thermostat?

Granola Personal has always included a breakdown of your savings in three dimensions: energy, money, and carbon footprint. It also calculates a number of equivalence classes for each of these dimensions, giving you a concrete example of it’s benefits. I took a little time to do some research, and I’ve done the same thing for a number of common household sustainability suggestions.

Use a clothesline instead of a dryer (5 loads/month)

You’d save 149.5 kWh, enough energy to power a dryer, a space heater, and a big plasma screen for a day

You’d reduce your carbon footprint by 203.32 lbs of CO2, as much as 4 trees, 22 miles in a compact car, and 34 daisies

You’d save $17.94, enough cash for a monkey wrench to throw in the gears, a political bumper sticker, and a tomato from the farmers market

Swap a 60W bulb with a 13W CFL equivalent (used 10hrs/day)

You’d save 171.5 kWh, enough energy to power a dryer, an air conditioner, and a refrigerator for a day

You’d reduce your carbon footprint by 233.24 lbs of CO2, as much as 4 trees, a day of electricity for your home, and 2 miles in a compact car

You’d save $20.58, enough cash for a 16-pack of CFL bulbs, a political bumper sticker, and a tomato from the farmers market

Eliminate all of your vampire load

You’d save 574.8 kWh, enough energy to power a radio station transmitter, a water heater, and an incandescent bulb for a day

You’d reduce your carbon footprint by 781.73 lbs of CO2, as much as a small car, a tree, and a gallon of gasoline

You’d save $68.98, enough cash for a goat for lawn mowing and 2 packs of granola bars

Turn off your 100W computer when it’s unused

You’d save 584.0 kWh, enough energy to power a radio station transmitter, a water heater, and a small window unit AC for a day

You’d reduce your carbon footprint by 794.24 lbs of CO2, as much as a small car, a tree, and a day of electricity for your home

You’d save $70.08, enough cash for a goat for lawn mowing, 2 packs of granola bars, and a reusable grocery bag

Turn your thermostat down/up 10 degrees when you’re at work

You’d save 1149.6 kWh, enough energy to power an electric vehicle charger, a radio station transmitter, and an air conditioner for a day

You’d reduce your carbon footprint by 1563.46 lbs of CO2, as much as midsize car, 5 trees, and a gallon of gasoline

You’d save $137.95, enough cash for a giraffe adoption, a Kill-A-Watt power meter, and a pack of granola bars

Use a ceiling fan instead of a window unit AC while you sleep

You’d save 1389.92 kWh, enough energy to power 2 electric vehicle chargers, an electric furnace, and a big plasma screen for a day

You’d reduce your carbon footprint by 1890.29 lbs of CO2, as much as midsize car, 2 500-mile flights, and a tree

You’d save $166.79, enough cash for a giraffe adoption, a goat for lawn mowing, and a pack of granola bars

Change all your light bulbs from incandescent to CFL

You’d save 1524.37 kWh, enough energy to power a commercial heater, a dryer, and a big coffee maker for a day

You’d reduce your carbon footprint by 2073.14 lbs of CO2, as much as midsize car, a small car, and a tree

You’d save $182.92, enough cash for a solar panel, 2 packs of granola bars, and a shirt from the thrift store

So it looks like using alternative cooling/heating, upgrading your thermostat, changing your light bulbs, and (of course!) turning off your computer are all good bets. If you’re interested in doing the latter, be sure to check out Granola Enterprise. For $20, you can control up to five computers, which is, like, 25 lawn-mowing goats worth of savings.

If you’ve got any questions or comments, or if you would like to see anything else estimated, let me know in the comments.

UPDATE: Assumptions used on the calculation and references:
All savings are annualized, so when it says ‘enough to power a tanning bed for a day’ it means you’d save enough in a year to power a tanning bed running continuously for a day. When it says ‘as much [CO2] as a midsized car’, it means the amount of CO2 a midsized car would release in a year.
US National average cost/kWh of $0.12 (source)
Each kWh releases 1.31lbs of CO2 into the atmosphere (source)
Average american yearly energy consumed is 11,496kWh (source)
You can save 10% on your electric bill by adjusting your thermostat (source)
The emissions of variously sized automobiles (source)
Energy used by lighting systems is roughly 1/6th total residential energy (source)

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Joseph

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Turn off your PC – The cost of PC gaming

Tuesday, May 29th, 2012

TLDR – turn off your games PC and you could buy another game each year.

Working for a software company that saves people money off their power bill it is hard not to think about how I can save some dollars at home using what we learn.

My coworker Geoff and I have been taking power meters home to see what the true cost of PC gaming is. Not just the outlay for hardware and software but what the day-to-day costs really are. This series of posts will help PC gamers do our bit for the environment and save some cash at the same time.

Before you can figure out how to save some money you first have to know how much you are spending. Both Geoff and I play every day and both have decent enough PCs. Using power meters borrowed from work we measured some baseline power numbers for our current games of choice.

Machine Power State Watts KWH Dollars Per Hour
geoffstacks Off 2.50 0.0025 $0.0002
geoffstacks Sleeping 4.00 0.0040 $0.0004
geoffstacks Idle 108.00 0.1080 $0.0119
geoffstacks In game D3 269.51 0.2695 $0.0296
mbafk Off 2.92 0.0029 $0.0003
mbafk Sleeping 5.50 0.0055 $0.0006
mbafk Idle 100.14 0.1001 $0.0110
mbafk In game DOW2 157.70 0.1577 $0.0173

If you assume a 20 hour a week habit and using $0.11 a KWH. Actually playing costs Geoff $30.83 a year and me $18.04. Not too shabby if you think about it in dollars per hour.

As I am sure you have guessed the point here is what happens when we are not playing games. Talking to people I know, we gamers seems to fit into two camps: 1) Turn off the monitor but leave the PC on. 2) Turn off the monitor and shutdown or sleep the PC.

If Geoff leaves his machine idle (but does turn off his monitor) when he does not play it costs him $66.66 a year more than if he turned off the system.

If I did the same, in one year it would cost me $45.05 extra.

I don’t know much about Diablo 3 but $45 will buy you a whole lot of pointless DLC skins for Dawn of War 2. But seriously folks, turn off your PC when you aren’t using it. The environment will thank you and so will your wallet.

If you’re interested in what your own power consumption looks like over time, you should sign up for a free Granola Enterprise account.
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Mat

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Posted in Gaming, Green IT, IT Impact | 18 Comments »

Which countries’ geeks care about the environment?

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

We have been offering Granola Personal for free since April 2010. Since then, it has been downloaded all over the world. We recently looked at which countries were still using Granola Personal and have created a map which shows which countries have the best ratio of Granola Personal users to population. We reckon this is pretty good indicator of where the geeks that care about the environment are living.

World map of the caring geeks
Click to see the live map.

It is not a surprise that the tiny countries can fare quite well with this kind of data. But when you get away from island chains you see countries like Belgium which has more than 10 million people, and as of this evening they managed to get to 5th place. So you can’t just use your population as an excuse, some countries do care more about the environment.

As an Englishman it’s a bit disappointing to see us down in 21st. A good chunk of Europe is above us, not exactly a good showing. Just in case you are wondering, the Aland Islands are between Sweden and Finland.

If you don’t like where your country is on our list, you should download Granola Personal for free and tell other people about it. The map will update automatically and the environment will thank you.

If you have a load of computers and want to see how much energy you are wasting we also have a free energy audit product you can use.
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Mat

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Thirsty Computers Drink While They Think

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

No, I’m not talking about the glorious watercooling seen below.

Crazy WatercoolingAn interactive map published recently by IEEE as part of their Water vs. Energy Special Report highlights an aspect of energy consumption that is often overlooked by the media: the tradeoff between energy production and water supply. As the map says, “Just having water and energy doesn’t protect a place from water and energy conflicts.” The map shows such conflicts around the globe, from China to Pennsylvania. In each, increased energy production results in problems with the water supply. The bit to take away is that each energy source has a hidden cost in the impact it will have on available water.

An interesting corollary to the energy-water tradeoff is that each Google search consumes about half a milliliter of water. At 300 million searches per day, Google users worldwide are consuming not just vast amounts of energy, but also roughly 150,000 liters of water daily.

And of course, it isn’t just Google. With the worldwide energy budget for IT growing, the water impact of PCs, laptops, and servers is beginning to reach significant levels. Implementing best practices, such as purchasing PCs and (soon) servers with the Energy Star label, setting appropriate sleep policies to power down inactive computers, and (of course) running Granola to save energy on active computers, will help restrict the growth of the environmental impact of computing, even as the number of computers worldwide increases.

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