My little brother has been working in the data center field, he sometimes tells me what’s going on, and he was in a meeting the other day, and thought he’d tell me what happened.
He was there in a data center protection guy role - (every system(s) purchased have to be approved by data center planning to ensure that one project doesn’t buy a system that is going to be a significant drain on data center resources).
So if Mini-Me is reading this, thank you for this, I’ve paraphrased it slightly to avoid anyone being identified, the company is based in the London area:
I was in a meeting with the windows guys, the grid guys and a vendor talking about the new blades we’re buying. I’d mentioned to the windows guys we’re happy to look at blades, but we want the energy efficient processors, not the slow ones, just for example the fastest at medium power requirement, the 2.6GHZ AMDs that need 68w than the 95w ones, and they were happy with that. Anyway everything was going fine until the sales guy mentioned energy efficient processors.
“We don’t care about that, we want fast, energy efficient means its slow, I want fastest, it has to be fast.” said grid guy number 1I then interrupted that we can have fast but there is an associated energy cost and our data center power has limits, we can’t we wasteful with it.
“It’s HPC, we want fast, the business need fast, they don’t care.” said grid guy number 2
“But looking at this chart you’re only getting 200mhz for 27w, do we really need that?” I asked
“I’m sure you wont notice it” said the windows manager
“Well we’ll need to test them, we need performance.” replied the grid guys
A debate is set to occur, whether the data center guys manage to convince the grid team that the more efficient processors will be good enough will depend on a number of things, in the meantime the grid guys will test the processors and see the difference on their performance statistics.
