Earlier this week we covered SiCortex’s take on the new Energy Star specification for servers, but we didn’t have much to say about the rating itself. For that we’ll point you to Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Register
On Friday, the server makers participating in the EPA effort, which will put Energy Star labels on servers that meet energy efficiency and environmental protection standards, received the detailed specs that allow them to certify their machines and receive a rating. The 1.0 spec for the rating is going to cause a lot of grumbling, as any standard in the server racket does. The first pass of the Energy Star 1.0 spec for servers only includes rack and tower servers with no more than four processor sockets and does not cover blade servers (including the blades and their chasses), fault tolerant servers, server appliances, multi-node servers (such as preconfigured clusters), storage equipment, or networking equipment.
Servers up to 4 cpus are not HPC. Don’t worry though, that’s coming. The group hopes to announce blades and multi-node clusters by the next release on October 15. More in the story.
