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Show HN: Terminal dashboard that throttles my PC during peak electricity rates
51–60 of 61 posts
Re: Show HN: Terminal dashboard that throttles my PC during peak electricity rates
#52People have made valid criticisms about the basic effectiveness of your strategy. But in any case, this is a pretty awesome hacker project - nicely done! Love the appearance of your CLI tool. I am definitely bookmarking for future inspo
Thanks! I initially just wanted to build a dashboard, with the power optimization part being a later addition. Based on the HN response, it seems that's the feature that resonated most with people. I'll be making improvements to the optimization component in the coming days and will publish what I have.
Re: Show HN: Terminal dashboard that throttles my PC during peak electricity rates
#53Quick update: Definitely wasn't expecting this to end up on the front page. I was more focused on publishing the dashboard than the power optimizer service I'm running. I'll take all the feedback into account and will open source an improved version of it soon. Appreciate all the comments!
That's quite a beefy workstation you got there!
Re: Show HN: Terminal dashboard that throttles my PC during peak electricity rates
#54If your computer is still doing bursty jobs during that period, it will use less power but still as much energy. Sure, you can reduce the power but if you aren't also reducing what you ask it to do, it'll just use that max amount of allowed power for a longer period of time.
As with everything, it depends. If you are going to do the same jobs regardless of the amount of time it takes, then yeah, dropping the max power probably just spreads the energy use over time. That doesn't usually help you save money, unless you have a very interesting residential plan.
OTOH, if it's something like realtime game rendering without a frame limiter, throttling would reduce the frame rate, reducing the total amount of work done, and most likely the total energy expended.
Re: Show HN: Terminal dashboard that throttles my PC during peak electricity rates
#55Within the next year or two, I'm going to look at implementing something similar at my work.
We don't pay for electricity directly (it's included in the rackspace rental), but we could reduce our carbon footprint by adjusting the timing of batch processing, perhaps based on the carbon intensity APIs from https://app.electricitymaps.com/
Though, the first step will be to quantify the savings. I have the impression from being in the datacentre while batch jobs have started that they cause a significant increase in power use, but no numbers.
Re: Show HN: Terminal dashboard that throttles my PC during peak electricity rates
#56Within the next year or two, I'm going to look at implementing something similar at my work. We don't pay for electricity directly (it's included in the rackspace rental), but we could reduce our carbon footprint by adjusting the timing of batch processing, perhaps based on the carbon intensity APIs from https://app.electricitymaps.com/ Though, the first step will be to quantify the savings. I have the impression fro…
Can you run the batch processing on other machines at off-peak hours?
Re: Show HN: Terminal dashboard that throttles my PC during peak electricity rates
#57Nice project, but would it not be more rational to have your system running underclocked/undervolted at the optimal perf/watt at all times, with an optional boost to max performance for a time critical task? Running it away from the optimum might save on instant consumption but increase your aggregate consumption.
Thanks! That's an excellent point. You're right that there's likely a sweet spot that would be more efficient overall than aggressive throttling. The current implementation uniformly sets max frequency for all 128 cores, but I'm working on per-core frequency control that would allow much more granular optimization. I'll definitely measure aggregate consumption with your suggestion versus my current implementation to…
Zooming out, 80-90% of a computer's lifecycle energy use is during manufacturing, not pulled from the wall during operation.[1] To optimize lifetime energy efficiency, it probably pushes toward extending hardware longevity (within reason, until breakeven) and maximizing compute utilization.
Ideally these goal are balanced (in some 'efficient' way) against matching electricity prices. It's not either/or, you want to do both.
Besides better amortizing the embodied energy, improving compute utilization could also mean increasing the quality of the compute workloads, ie doing tasks with high external benefits.
Love this project! Thanks for sharing.
[1] https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/embodied-energy-in-comp...
Re: Show HN: Terminal dashboard that throttles my PC during peak electricity rates
#58Within the next year or two, I'm going to look at implementing something similar at my work. We don't pay for electricity directly (it's included in the rackspace rental), but we could reduce our carbon footprint by adjusting the timing of batch processing, perhaps based on the carbon intensity APIs from https://app.electricitymaps.com/ Though, the first step will be to quantify the savings. I have the impression fro…
You’re probably already on top of it but if your company doesn't operate the datacenter you’ll also want to estimate the carbon cost of cooling in addition to the electricity that the machines consume.
Re: Show HN: Terminal dashboard that throttles my PC during peak electricity rates
#59This looks cool but I feel it should notify the user with a snip from the song "You Suffer" by "Napalm Death" when throttling occurs.
Re: Show HN: Terminal dashboard that throttles my PC during peak electricity rates
#60It's usually more energy-efficient to finish a task quickly with a higher power draw, also known as race-to-idle.
Good point. I'm often running multiple parallel jobs with varying priorities where uniform throttling actually makes sense. Many LLM inference tasks are long-running but not fully utilizing hardware (often waiting on I/O or running at partial capacity) The dual Epyc CPUs (128 cores) in my setup have a relatively high idle power draw compared to consumer chips. Even when "idle" they're consuming significant power main…
It seems it may be relatively accessible to take a few representative tasks and actually measure the soup-to-nuts energy consumed at the plug. Would be very interesting to see in tandem with the power optimizations!