Mercury and freon: temperature emulation and management for server systems

  • Authors:

  • Taliver Heath;Ana Paula Centeno;Pradeep George;Luiz Ramos;Yogesh Jaluria;Ricardo Bianchini

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Computer Science, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ;Dept. of Computer Science, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ;Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Rutgers University, NJ;Dept. of Computer Science, Rutgers University, Piscatawy, NJ;Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Rutgers University, NJ;Dept. of Computer Science, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Power densities have been increasing rapidly at all levels of server systems. To counter the high temperatures resulting from these densities, systems researchers have recently started work on softwarebased thermal management. Unfortunately, research in this new area has been hindered by the limitations imposed by simulators and real measurements. In this paper, we introduce Mercury, a software suite that avoids these limitations by accurately emulating temperatures based on simple layout, hardware, and componentutilization data. Most importantly, Mercury runs the entire software stack natively, enables repeatable experiments, and allows the study of thermal emergencies without harming hardware reliability. We validate Mercury using real measurements and a widely used commercial simulator. We use Mercury to develop Freon, a system that manages thermal emergencies in a server cluster without unnecessary performance degradation. Mercury will soon become available from http://www.darklab.rutgers.edu.