Delivering energy proportionality with non energy-proportional systems: optimizing the ensemble

  • Authors:

  • Niraj Tolia;Zhikui Wang;Manish Marwah;Cullen Bash;Parthasarathy Ranganathan;Xiaoyun Zhu

  • Affiliations:

  • HP Labs, Palo Alto;HP Labs, Palo Alto;HP Labs, Palo Alto;HP Labs, Palo Alto;HP Labs, Palo Alto;HP Labs, Palo Alto

  • Venue:
  • HotPower'08 Proceedings of the 2008 conference on Power aware computing and systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

With power having become a critical issue in the operation of data centers today, there has been an increased push towards the vision of "energy-proportional computing", in which no power is used by idle systems, very low power is used by lightly loaded systems, and proportionately higher power at higher loads. Unfortunately, given the state of the art of today's hardware, designing individual servers that exhibit this property remains an open challenge. However, even in the absence of redesigned hardware, we demonstrate how optimization-based techniques can be used to build systems with off-the-shelf hardware that, when viewed at the aggregate level, approximate the behavior of energy-proportional systems. This paper explores the viability and tradeoffs of optimization-based approaches using two different case studies. First, we show how different power-saving mechanisms can be combined to deliver an aggregate system that is proportional in its use of server power. Second, we show early results on delivering a proportional cooling system for these servers. When compared to the power consumed at 100% utilization, results from our testbed show that optimization-based systems can reduce the power consumed at 0% utilization to 15% for server power and 32% for cooling power.