International Business Machines Corporation

Maya P Yarbrough

Challis Llewellyn Purrington

James Edward Hughes

Gary Roy Shippy

Christopher Collier West

Michael Leo Scollard

Paul Anthony Smith

Henry Gaines McMillan

Jack P Wong

Power is allocated to blades based on an estimate of the actual power they are expected to use rather than their maximum-power draw-value. To protect against situations where the estimated actual-power draw-value is exceeded, a hardware comparator monitors the blade system load against a predetermined threshold value set by a management module (MM) based on user input. If this threshold value is exceeded, a throttle latch is triggered, based on a signal from a service processor monitoring the blade system load. The output of this latch directly engages throttling. The service processor also monitors the output of the latch and communicates information regarding the throttling to the MM for evaluation.

Throttle management for blade system

A simple, but intelligent watchdog circuit uses an up/down counter for its delay element. A watchdog event will occur if the counter is allowed to over flow or under flow its boundaries (in either direction). The system objective is to keep the counter within its boundaries by controlling the direction of the count. The count direction is simply a function of the Most Significant Bit (MSB) of the counter. Thus, the system must simply monitor the counters MSB and perform a little intelligent to determine the desired count direction.

Intelligent watchdog circuit

Growing community of inventors

Cary, NC, United States of America

Maya P Yarbrough