Ford saves over $1 million by shutting down computers | Hacker News Reader

Ford saves over $1 million by shutting down computers

media.ford.com

14 pointsMikeCapone10 comments

Just one of the many examples that highlights the market for energy-proportional computing. Check out http://www.cra.org/ccc/docs/ieee_computer07.pdf. Machines today still consume around 50 percent of total peak power while sitting at idle!

Interesting they specifically mention being able to save Office documents automatically. It'd be really nice if all programs implemented a method for the OS to call 5 or 10 minutes prior to shut-down to let even heavy duty apps save all their data too.

Why do they even shut down the computer? Why can't they force it to hibernate, thereby eliminating the need to automatically save documents?

Because the consultant charged $2M for that advice. In most corporates you leave the machine on because everytime you boot it spends 10mins connecting to various corporate fileshares, 10mins syncing profiles, 10mins downloading updates etc. And you can't set it to hibernate/sleep because you don't have admin rights.

If you are feeling really green you turn off the monitor.

If companies really cared about the environment they would question why they needed 100,000s of people to drive to a downtown office block to sit in front of computers doing the electronic equivalent of pushing forms around the company.

10mins syncing profiles, 10mins downloading updates

If you never reboot on Windows, these things never happen, and all the automated copy-to-the-server backups, profile syncing and updates are for naught.

Interesting how the incentives play out.

(DVCS show similar things in reverse---by making merges much cheaper, they change the workflow, too.)

This was at the corporate IT level, so they can control when the machines are powered on and off. Presumably, they could have them power on 30 minutes before staff arrived in the morning.

I think that you went off on a little too much of a green tangent there.

The question is if they are telling Office software to save and close documents, why aren't they just hibernating the machines to save the entire state? The only time I can think of them needing to restart would be for some updates, but I'm not familiar with how a machine handles file shares when hibernating..

It's SIGPWR, signal 30. Usually only used for power failure though.

Isn't $1 million to Ford basically $1 to an individual? I have a feeling they could have gotten 80% of the benefit with far less than 20% of the work by creating a batch file on everyone's desktop that puts the computer to sleep and asking them to click it after they're done for the day. Sure a lot of people wouldn't, but you'd also be saving all the money spent on creating their system for automating the shut downs.

It isn't a lot of money for Ford, but these days, automakers will take whatever they can get. It might also just be the beginning of a bigger energy efficiency initiative.

If they can reduce recurring costs by a few millions, that's money that can be put to better use somewhere else.

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