At my institution, I don’t deal with the facility issues much but I did suggest a while back that it might be useful (in terms of dollars) to have the Provost’s Office kick in extra funds to any grant dollars aimed at cluster purchases to cover the difference from a ‘normal’ chip to a low-power version.

The reason for this is that Joe Researcher doesn’t care whatsoever what the power costs are of his system because he doesn’t pay the power bill – he simply wants to get the most computational bang for his buck. However, funds for power and cooling DO come from the university itself, and machine room power is usually more limited than machine room space. So, in the end, if it costs the university $10K to buy the more expensive chips, but that saves $18K in power over three years (.. I’m tossing random numbers out..), it’s a net win, especially when you consider that you can pack more into a single machine room and don’t need a new one built.

Of course, with so many other things to tackle this always seems to fall off the radar of the powers-that-be. Which, again, makes me even more impressed that Argonne ran with it. Nice job, guys.

(PS. Yeah, I should probably look up power costs in our area to see how much of a win it might be.)