[Beowulf] Cooling vs HW replacement
Ariel Sabiguero
asabigue at fing.edu.uy
Sun Jan 9 05:09:40 PST 2005
Hello all.
The following question shall only consider costs, not uptime or
reliability of the solution.
I need to balance costs of hardware replacement after failures over air
conditioning costs.
The question arises as most current hardware comes with 3 or more years
of warranty. During that period of time Moore twofolded twice hardware
performance... is it worth spending money cooling down a cluster or just
rebuilding it after it "burns out" (and is at least 4 times slower than
state-of-the art)?
Is it worth cooling down the room to a Class A Computer room standard or
save the money for hardware upgrade after three years? In warm countries
keeping 18ºC the air inside a room (PC-heated) when outside temperature
is 30ºC average it becomes pretty expensive to pay electricity bills. It
is cheaper to "circulate" 30ºC air and have from 40-50ºC inside the chassis.
Do you have figures or graphs plotting MTBF vs temperature for main
system components (memory, CPU, mainboard, HDD) ?
Links to this information are highly appreciated!
I remember old (40MB RLL disks shipping this information with the
device, several pages of printed manual) hardware showing the
difference in MTBF vs environment conditions, but nowadays commodity
harware does not consider this on the sticker on the top of the device...
Regards
Ariel
PS: if the idea is worth the money, then I would like to study
reliability and uptime, but it is not the main concern now.
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