by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor
“I’m riding a train to San Francisco, and I’m reading a newspaper. The train’s vibrating and my arms are vibrating and the newspaper’s vibrating. I can still read the newspaper, but it takes more concentration, so I don’t read as fast as I normally do. It’s just more work to focus on a moving target.”
Makes sense. But why is he telling me this story at a conference about supercomputing? As it turns out, Larry Gordon is the vice president of marketing for a startup called Green Platform Corporation, and the scenario he’s describing on the train is analogous to the problem that hard disk drives encounter when reading and writing data in a datacenter environment — a problem, he believes, the company has solved.
According to Gus Malek-Madani, Green Platform’s founder and CEO, vibration in the datacenter forces a disk drive to work extra hard to perform reads and writes, degrading performance. And not just a little. Independent tests indicate as much as two-thirds of I/O throughput is being lost due to vibration. Worse yet, as performance suffers, the disk has to do additional work to access data, slowing down the entire compute system and raising power consumption proportionally. Tests indicate that as vibration increases, energy use can more than double for a given job.
