The Green Grid has partnered with the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to run a test of the eight proxies that have been proposed for measuring the amount of energy data centers use to perform a unit of useful work.

Dan Azevedo, a board member of The Green Grid, said the test will produce quantifiable results, which the organization hopes will help decide which of the proxies are more accurate. The test will also show how easy or how hard it is to apply each of the proxies.

"We're going to run the one workload ÔÇô in the interest of time ÔÇô and see if there is a clear winner," Azevedo said.

Ease of implementation has been one of the factors that has been stalling the process of narrowing the list of proposed proxies down. Some organizations has easily measurable isolated workloads, such as financial transactions, and other organizations have workloads that are not easily quantifiable, such as enterprise IT.

For this reason, stakeholders in the decision-making process have fallen into two camps: those who want a metric that is very accurate but harder to implement and those who want one that is simple and "good enough" in terms of accuracy.

Various organizations have run tests of different proposed proxies, but it is hard to compare results of these tests justly because testing was not done as a joint effort. This is why The Green Grid decided to run a benchmark workload to get a productivity curve and then apply every one of the eight proxies to see if some are better than others.

If there is one that is a clear winner, "that would be amazing", Azevedo said.

With agreement with the lab already in place, the organizations have to sign off on details of the experiment. Once that is done, researchers will have between four and six weeks to run the experiment, collect data and begin publishing the results.