According to "The Economic Meltdown of Moore’s Law and the Green Data Center" presented by The Uptime Institute Inc. in 2007, this year, 2009 is when 3-years-electricity-cost will be the same amount as server cost. And in 2012, it is expected to be doubled.

What does this mean?

If you are a facility manager, you must be very sensitive to energy costs today. But what about you, as an IT manager who develops software? Probably not. For your business requirement does not include energy costs.

But soon, you will need to take it into account if the cost is rising as expected. It's easy to get the whole power consumption just by plug it into a measurement equipment, but doesn't tell which consumes how much at all.

Fortunately, there're many studies available. But unfortunately, no practical tool/project available today.

So I will get started my project next month, which is based on the study, "Full-System Power Analysis and Modeling for Server Environments". An overview of the project is illustrated below.

Months ago, I got 3 Dell-T105 cheap boxes with AMD Opteron Quad Core and 4GB RAMs. So they look convenient to begin with.

For the time being, the project is only for Linux. And the main performance counter to use is PerfSuite.

Basically, there won't be any technical problems, but the question is if such a user community can be built. I guess the project could be runnable by revenues through ads from vendors.

But at first, let's see my boxes can show reliable results.