High Performance Computing Power Saving Device

For the AMD-based cluster, there would have been savings of about $6 per hour, based on a local company's costs for power and chilled water.  The power savings comes with a performance decrease of about 50-70%, so this is only really effective as a tool to prevent system outages if the cooling fails, and not to save money when the system is up and running normally.

Power savings on the Intel-based cluster are 0-10%; power savings on the AMD-based cluster are 10-35%, both based upon system usage at the time.  Cooling savings are the same as the power savings.

On the AMD-based cluster specifically, there was a drop from an average of about 290kW power usage and 90 tons of cooling to about 205kW and 65 tons of cooling.

The software runs on most distributions of Linux on running on modern x86_64 AMD and Intel CPU-based systems that are supported by the Linux kernel's Frequency Scaling driver, and was written for RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.0.  The other requirements are:

Altair PBS Works/PBS Pro for job scheduling -
C3 tools from Oak Ridge National Laboratory - http://www.csm.ornl.gov/torc/C3/