Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), CPU pinning, horizontal, and vertical scaling, are four techniques that have been proposed as actuators to control the performance and energy consumpti ...
@cite_62: Energy consumption is a growing issue in data centers, impacting their economic viability and their public image. In this work we empirically characterize the power and energy consumed by different types of servers. In particular, in order to understand the behavior of their energy and power consumption, we perform measurements in different servers. In each of them, we exhaustively measure the power consumed by the CPU, the disk, and the network interface under different configurations, identifying the optimal operational levels. One interesting conclusion of our study is that the curve that defines the minimal CPU power as a function of the load is neither linear nor purely convex as has been previously assumed. Moreover, we find that the efficiency of the various server components can be maximized by tuning the CPU frequency and the number of active cores as a function of the system and network load, while the block size of I O operations should be always maximized by applications. We also show how to estimate the energy consumed by an application as a function of some simple parameters, like the CPU load, and the disk and network activity. We validate the proposed approach by accurately estimating the energy of a map-reduce computation in a Hadoop platform.
@cite_7: Energy management has become increasingly necessary in large-scale cloud data centers to address high operational costs and carbon footprints to the environment. In this work, we combine three mana ...
@cite_8: 
@cite_48: With the advent of Cloud computing, large-scale virtualized compute and data centers are becoming common in the computing industry. These distributed systems leverage commodity server hardware in mass quantity, similar in theory to many of the fastest Supercomputers in existence today. However these systems can consume a cities worth of power just to run idle, and require equally massive cooling systems to keep the servers within normal operating temperatures. This produces CO 2 emissions and significantly contributes to the growing environmental issue of Global Warming. Green computing, a new trend for high-end computing, attempts to alleviate this problem by delivering both high performance and reduced power consumption, effectively maximizing total system efficiency. This paper focuses on scheduling virtual machines in a compute cluster to reduce power consumption via the technique of Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS). Specifically, we present the design and implementation of an efficient scheduling algorithm to allocate virtual machines in a DVFS-enabled cluster by dynamically scaling the supplied voltages. The algorithm is studied via simulation and implementation in a multi-core cluster. Test results and performance discussion justify the design and implementation of the scheduling algorithm.
@cite_44: Reducing the energy footprint of warehouse-scale computer (WSC) systems is key to their affordability, yet difficult to achieve in practice. The lack of energy proportionality of typical WSC hardware and the fact that important workloads (such as search) require all servers to remain up regardless of traffic intensity renders existing power management techniques ineffective at reducing WSC energy use. We present PEGASUS, a feedback-based controller that significantly improves the energy proportionality of WSC systems, as demonstrated by a real implementation in a Google search cluster. PEGASUS uses request latency statistics to dynamically adjust server power management limits in a fine-grain manner, running each server just fast enough to meet global service-level latency objectives. In large cluster experiments, PEGASUS reduces power consumption by up to 20 . We also estimate that a distributed version of PEGASUS can nearly double these savings
@cite_23: Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) has been a useful power management strategy in embedded systems, mobile devices, and wireless sensor networks. Recently, it has also been proposed for servers and data centers in conjunction with service consolidation and optimal resource-pool sizing. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the scope and usefulness of DVFS in a server environment. We set up a multimedia server which will be used in two different scenarios. In the first scenario, the server will host requests to download video files of known and available formats. In the second scenario, videos of unavailable formats can be accepted; in which case the server employs a trans coder to convert between AVI, MPEG and SLV formats before the videos are downloaded. The workload we generate has a uniform arrival rate and an exponentially distributed video size. We use four dynamic scaling policies which are widely used with existing mainstream Linux operating systems. Our observation is that while the gain of DVFS is clear in the first scenario (in which a predominantly IO-bound application is used), its use in the second scenario is rather counterproductive.
@cite_47: Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is a commonly-used power-management technique where the clock frequency of a processor is decreased to allow a corresponding reduction in the supply voltage. This reduces power consumption, which can lead to significant reduction in the energy required for a computation, particularly for memory-bound workloads. However, recent developments in processor and memory technology have resulted in the saturation of processor clock frequencies, larger static power consumption, smaller dynamic power range and better idle sleep modes. Each of these developments limit the potential energy savings resulting from DVFS. We analyse this trend by examining the potential of DVFS across three platforms with recent generations of AMD processors. We find that while DVFS is effective on the older platforms, it actually increases energy usage on the most recent platform, even for highly memory-bound workloads.
@cite_17: Large-scale Internet services require a computing infrastructure that can beappropriately described as a warehouse-sized computing system. The cost ofbuilding datacenter facilities capable of delivering a given power capacity tosuch a computer can rival the recurring energy consumption costs themselves.Therefore, there are strong economic incentives to operate facilities as closeas possible to maximum capacity, so that the non-recurring facility costs canbe best amortized. That is difficult to achieve in practice because ofuncertainties in equipment power ratings and because power consumption tends tovary significantly with the actual computing activity. Effective powerprovisioning strategies are needed to determine how much computing equipmentcan be safely and efficiently hosted within a given power budget. In this paper we present the aggregate power usage characteristics of largecollections of servers (up to 15 thousand) for different classes ofapplications over a period of approximately six months. Those observationsallow us to evaluate opportunities for maximizing the use of the deployed powercapacity of datacenters, and assess the risks of over-subscribing it. We findthat even in well-tuned applications there is a noticeable gap (7 - 16 )between achieved and theoretical aggregate peak power usage at the clusterlevel (thousands of servers). The gap grows to almost 40 in wholedatacenters. This headroom can be used to deploy additional compute equipmentwithin the same power budget with minimal risk of exceeding it. We use ourmodeling framework to estimate the potential of power management schemes toreduce peak power and energy usage. We find that the opportunities for powerand energy savings are significant, but greater at the cluster-level (thousandsof servers) than at the rack-level (tens). Finally we argue that systems needto be power efficient across the activity range, and not only at peakperformance levels.
DVFS has been used to reduce the power consumption of sever systems by reducing the operating voltage and frequency of the CPU @cite_62 @cite_7 @cite_48 . DVFS has been studied extensively in the literature with some studies suggesting that DVFS can considerably improve power consumption @cite_17 @cite_48 , while others show that for some applications the usage of DVFS can increase the overall energy consumption @cite_47 , or that there is at least a need to do a full system analysis before deciding if DVFS is useful for a workload @cite_23 @cite_8 . The limitations of DVFS, e.g., being coarse grained with only few possible settings, have also been discussed @cite_44 .