I do computational biology and I have a pretty heavy-duty setup sitting right next to my bench. It includes the following:
- 1x HP ProLiant DL385 G7 Server w/ 2x 12-core AMD Opteron processors (6174, 2.2GHz, 80W) + 96 GB ram (8x8GB).
- 2x HP StorageWorks D2600 w/12 600GB 6G SAS 15K HDD (7.2TB Bundle)
- 1x HP 3KVA UPS
The entire system occupies 8u (just to give you an idea) and I am running Ubuntu server 10.04.
About half of the time, the server will be crunching data coming off of DNA sequencing instrument and all 24 cores should be in use + frequent writing/reading from disk.
25% of the time I am running ad-hoc jobs that I've customized to utilize all the cores (using fork() or other methods).
About 25% of the time there is nothing running on the server. However, since I may be developing or running jobs from home at night, I need the server to be available by SSH all the time (dynamic IP w/ a hostname provided by my institution).
I've noticed that even when the server is completely idle, it is still pretty loud. The fans for the server and the RAID Arrays are running (albeit not at full tilt). Is there any good power management software that can be run to shutdown the raid arrays (until accessed) or otherwise decrease power usage and total noise output?