If you run a compute heavy server farm or blockchain mining operation, you likely know all too well just how high electricity bills can become. What if your servers could automatically respond to the energy market by throttling compute according to the electricity costs incurred at a five minute resolution?
We currently support a rudimentary implementation where we will turn off power to a UPS when the price goes above a set threshold. This could allow your servers time to throttle down and enter sleep mode or turn off when the cost of compute becomes higher than the reward for completing it. The servers could be automatically powered up and throttled up again when power to the UPS is restored due to the availability of cheaper electricity.
It would not be significant work for us to expose an API to allow more sophisticated software implementations of server throttling. Please contact us if this is of interest to you and we may organise to swing our development in this direction.
The settings below outline how you would configure Powerlake to implement the rudimentary approach described above:
Recommended Powerlake Settings:
- Daily Run Time: 24 hours
- Set this to 24 to get 24/7 uptime when prices are acceptable.
- There is a known bug when requesting 24h of run time per day. Contact us to show interest and hold tight, it should be an easy fix. In the meantime, use 23h as a close approximation.
- Renewable Bias: 0-10
- Does nothing for very long run time applications.
- Max Price: 5-30c/kWh
- This is your point of control. The Powerlake enabled Smart Plug will turn off any time the price is above this value.
We use price data from Amber Electric and currently support TP-Link KP105 & KP115 Smart Plugs
Our Savings Calculator was not designed with this use case specifically in mind, but feel free to check it out anyway, we think it’s pretty cool.