The Power Usage Of A 50+ Linux System Benchmarking Farm

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 11 June 2015 at 09:50 PM EDT. 14 Comments
HARDWARE
The power use of our open-source, Linux benchmarking test farm is on the rise, especially over the summer months.

For those following the progress on the basement conversion into a Linux server room use for the LinuxBenchmarking.com server farm that's tracking the progress on the mainline Linux kernel, GCC, LLVM Clang, and other projects on a daily basis, here's the latest numbers.

While I've added extra ventilation to the basement server room, with summer coming about and needing to run the air conditioner frequently, the electrical costs are only adding up on top of the 50+ systems. For the trailing 30 days, the power usage has spiked substantially with warm weather and adding more systems.


My latest electrical bill, a few months after the basement conversion into the server room and the warm weather.


The electrical use is hitting a massive high for the year. The increased electrical use attributed to the server room devoted to LinuxBenchmarking.com, which is ad-free, is now about $300 USD per month. This is while the server room temperature generally hovers 75~82°F any time of the day.

While LinuxBenchmarking.com will reveal its true value in due time when all of these systems have had more time to conduct their daily open-source benchmarks, I just want to remind readers that if they suppor their work on this (and Phoronix itself) to please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium, making a PayPal tip, and/or following Phoronix on Facebook and Twitter. It's a massive operation especially when it rests mostly just on my shoulders. Thanks for your support over the past eleven years.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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