Hosted May 10-11 at IBM’s Research Triangle Park facilities, after a one-year hiatus, the invitation-only 2011 IBM Power Symposium included a mix of IBM presenters who painted a picture of the future direction of power architectures and product demand for the full range of IBM servers and retail point-of-sale systems.
Bob Murphy, VP Integrated Supply Chain kicked off the meeting with a discussion of "Power Technology for a Smarter Planet." He pointed out that the third-phase in the transformation of IBM’s supply chain strategy is underway and is focused on "Smarter" solutions including instrumented, interconnected and intelligent systems. The key goal is the optimization of performance across complete systems.
Murphy focused on four areas related specifically related to power. Efficient power conversion across all load ranges and systems capable of operating from ac power or high-voltage dc power are one focus. Reliability is a second focus including improved redundancy design and verification.
Effective telemetry and diagnostic capabilities are being integrated from the individual power converters to the overall system power management, control and diagnostics of each individual server. Finally, Murphy discussed advanced packaging technologies including lead-free, 3-dimensional packages, higher integration and improved packaging standardization that are key focuses in the near-term.
Nick Gruendler, Chief Engineer for Blades and Modular Power Management followed Murphy with a discussion of a range of power and cooling issues. In addition to continued efforts to improve the efficiency of power converters, IBM is offering a range of load consolidation and power management capabilities.
Active Energy Manager 4.3 is the latest development in enabling server users to minimize power consumption. It consists of a combination of "no charge" monitoring functions and "priced" management functions. The management functions are priced per server (or end-point) being managed. They are delivered as a plug-in to IBM’s Systems Director 6.2 software suite.
Brsian Hruby. Senior Engineering Manager, followed Gruendler with a discussion of trends in mid-range server power architectures. To put the challenges in perspective, Hruby presented a block diagram of the power domains of IBM’s Power 770 server. That system includes 62 separate voltage domains (many with redundant power or phase-redundant power) along with 19 other analog circuits.
Specific areas of performance important in the systems designed by Hruby include accurate ac- and dc-power measurement, active calibration of dc current measurements, sufficient VRM slew rates to support advanced processor power management, and power system communication to ensure that the entire system stays operational when redundancy is lost during "oversubscription" events.
Ted Howard presented IBM’s plans for "Energy Efficiency Leadership" in the company’s System X servers. The central 3U ac-dc power supply delivers 1975W at 230Vac input of 875W at 115Vac input with a maximum density of 15.5W/cubic inch. Low-load efficiency improvements are a key goal of the next-generation power system code-named, "Ghidorah."
Compared with the previous-generation, "Athena," power systems, the 12Vdc output Ghidorah power supply is expected to improve efficiency by 16% at 10% load, by 6% at 20% load and by 4% at 30% load. This is expected to result in fewer fans needed per system. In addition, dc-dc converters in the Ghidorah system are expected to offer 5% higher efficiency for memory and 4% higher efficiency for Vcore.
Following the presentations by the IBM power conversion experts, technology and product overviews were presented by a number of IBM suppliers including: Analog Devices, Delta Products, Efficient power Conversion, Fuji Electric, International Rectifier, Liebert, Molex, Server Technology, TE Connectivity, and Texas Instruments. This year’s Symposium was closed with an hour-long panel discussion featuring the Power Architects from across all the IBM brands.
