UC San Diego puts power use on display

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As part of its efforts to control its intake of energy, UC San Diego has started deployment of a web portal that could eventual display energy consumption, and costs, down to individual offices at the campus

The Energy Dashboard grew out of a simple premise. “If you cannot measure energy use, you will not be able to make much headway in reducing your energy footprint,” said Yuvraj Agarwal, a Research Scientist in the Jacobs School of Engineering’s Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department.

…The tools available on the Energy Dashboard include real-time power measurement of the entire UCSD campus; energy consumption for each building; and power usage of individual devices such as PCs and servers that are plugged into electrical sockets in some CSE offices. The campus meters are all viewable by the public, but access to the individual meters is currently restricted to the owner of that meter (for privacy reasons).

You can click around the campus and see who’s using energy at the Dashboard website. I love that this is open to public inspection. The idea clearly extends to all HPC centers, and could be a powerful tool in enlisting individuals in center to start thinking about how to save energy, even down to the algorithms that get coded into demanding applications. Security concerns would prevent some centers from making their data public, but those that can should, while making sure that they are prepared at the same time to demonstrate that the energy they are using is worth it.