Penguin Computing Releases New Power Monitoring Device

Penguin Computing, experts in high performance computing (HPC) solutions, today announced the immediate availability of PowerInsight, a new product for monitoring server and desktop power consumption. PowerInsight was designed by Penguin Computing in close cooperation with Sandia National Laboratories. It is a compact device that measures power consumption for all subsystem components within a server. The product includes an ARM based server, a custom carrier board and kits of sensors and connectors for the various power rails within a system. All within a form factor small enough to fit a 3.5’’ drive tray. Examples of subsystems that can be monitored are CPU, Memory, hard drives, GPU, and fans.  Additional subsystem monitoring devices are planned. “In many data centers power is the biggest facility challenge,” says Phil Pokorny, CTO at Penguin Computing. “While tools that measure system level power consumption are a commodity, affordable, easy-to-use tools for obtaining power information at the subsystem level are virtually non-existent. We are the first company on the market that offers a solution that allows researchers, programmers and system manufacturers to gain more insight into the power consumption of their systems and the implications of their design decisions.” With its affordability and ease-of-use PowerInsight also enables the notion of ‘power aware programming’. Programmers that are faced with a choice of algorithms for solving a specific problem can now use PowerInsight make choices that consider power at the subsystem level as well as simple benchmark performance. “Our intent is for PowerInsight to further our understanding of energy usage down to the component level,” says James Laros, Principal Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. “Our experiments will try to empirically measure the effect -- on both performance and energy -- of hardware adjustments like CPU frequency scaling, and of software changes that involve algorithm modifications.” A demo of PowerInsight will be shown in Penguin Computing’s booth 1217 at SC’12 in Salt Lake City.