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A System Level Power Management for Web Clusters

Sébastien Lafond, Simon Holmbacka, Johan Lilius, A System Level Power Management for Web Clusters. In: Jean-marc Pierson, Helmut Hlavacs (Eds.), Proceedings of the COST Action IC0804 on Energy Efficiency in Large Scale Distributed Systems, 2nd Year, 127–131, IRIT, 2011.

Abstract:

Energy consumption is a major issue in data centers operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The power dissipated by a web cluster is not proportional to the numbers of incoming requests if only DVFS (Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling) is used. This is because of the nonlinear power
efficiency of DVFS, the large load fluctuation in web services and the typical CPU utilization rates of a server.
A cluster of low-end embedded processors could continuously match its computational capacity with the workload at a much finer granularity than a server-grade processor by changing the power states of the CPUs. This paper presents a system level controller making a cluster of low-power servers power proportional by managing the resources on the platform. Our controller uses sleep states to switch on or off CPUs in order to continuously match the current workload with the system capacity. Methods from control theory are used to drive the CPUs from and into sleep states. Results from system simulation show that power proportionality is obtainable with appropriate parameters set on the controller.

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BibTeX entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{iLaHoLi11a,
  title = {A System Level Power Management for Web Clusters},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the COST Action IC0804 on Energy Efficiency in Large Scale Distributed Systems, 2nd Year},
  author = {Lafond, Sébastien and Holmbacka, Simon and Lilius, Johan},
  editor = {Pierson, Jean-marc and Hlavacs, Helmut},
  publisher = {IRIT},
  pages = {127–131},
  year = {2011},
  keywords = {Power Management; Web Clusters; PIDcontroller; Low Power Processors;},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESLAB)

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