Power consumption of HP DL 580
 

I am planning to purchase a HP DL 580 Gen 7 with 4 Xeons and 128GB RAM. It requires 4 mandatory power supplies with 1598 W each. Redundancies are separate. I am trying to understand the electricity power consumption when all 4 processors run at optimum. This makes it 6.4KW / hour. An IT expert has advised that I should check how much maximum efficiency can the software run at. I do not know if it is a question relevant to this forum or not but can anyone please advise if I run OpenFOAM or Ansys or Numeca and assign it all the 48 cores with 32GB at each node, can I still expect a power consumption of 6 KW / hour. I am trying to apply for PhD scholarships and the biggest bottleneck I am facing is the number of publications. For this reason I have decided to buy a server and do some research and publish papers in CFD. I have completed my M.Phil in CFD but I used the university resources. But now in order to understand if I can finance private research myself, I need to have the understanding if a software requires full efficiency of the machine or not. If running of a server at full efficiency is not influenced by the software, then the electricity cost can prove to extremely prohibitive at 6KW/hour especially when I am doing LES which can run for a month to generate data. I shall be grateful for the advice.

Thanks and Regards

It would have been better to start this thread in the hardware sub-forum. Anyhow...

It is not the amount of (redundant) power supplies or their maximum wattage that determines the power consumption. It is the components.
This kind of server can use different CPUs ranging from 95W to 130W TDP. I don't know which CPUs you are planning to buy, so let me assume 130W to get a conservative estimate. Rough numbers for the other components are:
16 DIMMs: 100W
Motherboard: 50W
GPU: 50W (idle or low load)
Hard drives, Fans etc: 50W

So in total we are looking at 770W power consumption under load.
The power supplies are quite efficient (90% or more) so the system might draw ~850W from the wall under load. By the way, power consumption is measured in W, not W/h.

I have no idea what the IT expert tried to tell you :confused:
Are you really sure yours has 48 cores in total? I thought the CPUs for this generation have at most 10 cores each.


A word of warning: these servers are loud. If you want to put it in the same room where you work or even under your desk, better get one or two dual-socket workstations.

Thank you for this guidance and apologies for posting this question in the wrong forum. I have pasted the link below for the server I am interested in buying. You are right. It has got 10 cores each processor. Earlier I was looking at a machine with 48 Cores. This one has 80. It has four mandatory supplies as I have confirmed with HP. I do not know if it is 130 TDP but one processor is 105W. There are four so this makes it 420W. I shall use an external hard drive with 3TB as there is not enough space on this unit to save CFD data which go in TB. I think it should easily take approx 1000 Watts from your calculations. The reason for W/hour is to understand the electricity bills. In Western Australia, 1KWH is 1 unit. Therefore 1KWH for running 24 hours and 30 days gives me 720KWH. This was what I wanted to understand. Please correct me if I am wrong.

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/HP-DL580-...92989#viTabs_0

I have applied numerous times for scholarships in Germany as this country has more research opportunities than Australia but unfortunately due to the lack of publications, I miss out. I think this is the only way to get more publications if I want to reach RWTH Aachen or TU Darmstadt. Please advise if this idea of doing private research is a good one.

Thanks and Regards

Your questions regarding independent research and applications for scholarships would best be discussed in a separate thread.

Concerning your hardware choice...
In my opinion it takes a certain level of expertise to set up, run and maintain such a server. No offense, but the explicit and implicit information in this thread tells me that you are not an IT expert. I don't want to sound rude, but you have to be aware of this. Do you have someone to turn to if (to be more precise: when) problems occur?
Otherwise a more user-friendly normal workstation and/or renting resources on a cluster or even cloud computing might be a better option for you.
But your assumption is correct: this server will cause significant electricity costs. Apart from the high power consumption under load, old server hardware like this still consumes a significant amount of energy even when idling. I hear electricity prices in Australia are almost as high as in Germany. If you really want to take the route of having your own computing resources, Investing in more efficient hardware might pay off pretty quickly.