A case study and critical assessment in calculating power usage effectiveness for a data centre

Abstract

Metrics commonly used to assess the energy efficiency of data centres are analysed through performing and critiquing a case study calculation of energy efficiency. Specifically, the energy efficiency metric Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), which has become a de-facto standard within the data centre industry, will be assessed. This is achieved by using open source specifications for a data centre in Prineville, Oregon, USA provided by the Open Compute Project launched by the social networking company Facebook. The usefulness of the PUE metric to the IT industry is critically assessed and it is found that whilst it is important for encouraging lower energy consumption in data centres, it does not represent an unambiguous measure of energy efficiency. Key Words

A deceptive step towards quantum speedup detection

“…However, there is a remarkable difference: The data center uses 80% of the total consumed energy to run the computers, while the DW2000Q device requires only 10 −14 % of the power to run the quantum processing unit. Therefore, while an improvement of the power usage effectiveness (PUE) [45,46] for the classical data center would eventually reduce the total cooling power of 20%, far more efficient cooling alternatives are needed to reduce the quantum PUE (qPUE). It is unclear how the qPUE can be reduced due to the cryogenic requirements for quantum processing units.…”

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“…Similar to the PUE is the KPITE (Key Performance Indicator of Task Efficiency) introduced by ETSI [30]. The metric, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), was successfully used for improving the energy efficiency of DCs [12,31]. However, several problems and shortcomings were found.…”