Here’s advance notice of the Festive switch-off as it applies to Informatics.
This year’s request from the Computing Officers will be similar to last year’s:
Please help to reduce the University’s energy bill by switching off any
equipment, including computers and monitors, that you are unlikely to
use over the Xmas break.If you are responsible for research group servers, please consider powering these down over the vacation. Contact support if you need computing staff to do this for you.
You can power off a DICE box either by briefly pressing the power button on the front of the machine or choosing the Shutdown option from the menu at the bottom of the DICE login screen.
If you think you may want to remotely access your desktop over the holidays, log out […]. You can wake the machine again by going to wake.inf.ed.ac.uk. Self-managed machines can also be awoken using this mechanism – contact support for details.
Note that logging out will allow your machine to sleep. Putting it to sleep using System->Shutdown…->Suspend from within a graphical session doesn’t work completely yet – if the machine wakes again, it won’t go back to sleep. The comprehensive documentation on sleep explains more.
Can we do better than last year?
Last year, the data collected from the main meter showed that in the quietest week of the vacation we managed to reduce the total electricity use by about 23% on a typical week (Table 1, below). Data collected from the UPS systems showed that power used by offices was down by about 27% and server electricity was down by 28%. However the baseline usage (the minimum in any week) was down by only 21% for offices, as opposed to 26% for servers (Table 2). It would be great if we could get the baseline down lower this year.
Table 1: Weekly total electricity use (kWh)
from Office Server Other Total Forum % Server % Other % Total %
2011-12-05 10336 8193 25423 43953 100 100 100 100
2011-12-12 10162 7953 25033 43148 98 97 98 98
2011-12-19 8796 7248 24308 40352 85 88 96 92
2011-12-26 7513 5891 20229 33633 73 72 80 77
2012-01-02 8743 6953 22512 38208 85 85 89 87
2012-01-09 9749 7734 24365 41848 94 94 96 95
Table 2: Weekly baseline electricity use (kW) from Office Server Other Forum % Server % Other % 2011-12-05 52 47 98 100 100 100 2011-12-12 52 46 102 99 99 104 2011-12-19 41 35 96 79 74 98 2011-12-26 41 35 97 79 74 98 2012-01-02 43 35 91 81 75 93 2012-01-09 48 45 99 91 95 101