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IBM Power 595 Technical Overview and Introduction
hardware, firmware, and systems software, to provide a complete power and thermal
management solution. IBM has a comprehensive strategy for data center energy
management:
Reduce power at the system level where
work per watt
is the important metric, not
watts
per core
. POWER6-based systems provide more watt per core within the same power
envelope.
Manage power at the data center level through IBM Director Active Energy Manager.
Automate energy management policies such as:
– Energy monitoring and management through Active Energy Manager and EnergyScale
– Thermal and power measurement
– Power capping
– Dynamic power management and savings
– Performance-aware power management
Often, significant runtime variability occurs in the power consumption and temperature
because of natural fluctuations in system utilization and type of workloads being run.
Power management designs often use a worst-case conservation approach because servers
have fixed power and cooling budgets (for example, a 100 W processor socket in a
rack-mounted system). With this approach, the frequency or throughput of the chips must be
fixed to a point well below their capability, sacrificing sizable amounts of performance, even
when a non-peak workload is running or the thermal environment is favorable. Chips, in turn,
are forced to operate at significantly below their runtime capabilities because of a cascade of
effects. The net results include:
Power supplies are significantly over-provisioned.
Data centers are provisioned for power that cannot be used.
Higher costs with minimal benefit occur in most environments.
Building adaptability into the server is the key to avoiding conservative design points in order
to accommodate variability and to take further advantage of flexibility in power and
performance requirements. A design in which operational parameters are dictated by runtime
component, workload, environmental conditions, and by your current power versus
performance requirement is less conservative and more readily adjusted to your requirements
at any given time.
The IBM POWER6 processor is designed exactly with this goal in mind (high degree of
adaptability), enabling feedback-driven control of power and associated performance for
robust adaptability to a wide range of conditions and requirements. Explicit focus was placed
on developing each of the key elements for such an infrastructure: sensors, actuators, and
communications for control.
As a result, POWER6 microprocessor-based systems provide an array of capabilities for:
Monitoring power consumption and environmental and workload characteristics
Controlling a variety of mechanisms in order to realize the desired power and performance
trade-offs (such as the highest power reduction for a given performance loss)
Enabling higher performance and greater energy efficiency by providing more options to
the system designer to dynamically tune it to the exact requirements of the server
Summary of Contents for Power 595
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