7,072 research outputs found
Toward sustainable data centers: a comprehensive energy management strategy
Data centers are major contributors to the emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and this contribution is expected to increase in the following years. This has encouraged the development of techniques to reduce the energy consumption and the environmental footprint of data centers. Whereas some of these techniques have succeeded to reduce the energy consumption of the hardware equipment of data centers (including IT, cooling, and power supply systems), we claim that sustainable data centers will be only possible if the problem is faced by means of a holistic approach that includes not only the aforementioned techniques but also intelligent and unifying solutions that enable a synergistic and energy-aware management of data centers.
In this paper, we propose a comprehensive strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers that uses the energy as a driver of their management procedures. In addition, we present a holistic management architecture for sustainable data centers that implements the aforementioned strategy, and we propose design guidelines to accomplish each step of the proposed strategy, referring to related achievements and enumerating the main challenges that must be still solved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Computing server power modeling in a data center: survey,taxonomy and performance evaluation
Data centers are large scale, energy-hungry infrastructure serving the
increasing computational demands as the world is becoming more connected in
smart cities. The emergence of advanced technologies such as cloud-based
services, internet of things (IoT) and big data analytics has augmented the
growth of global data centers, leading to high energy consumption. This upsurge
in energy consumption of the data centers not only incurs the issue of surging
high cost (operational and maintenance) but also has an adverse effect on the
environment. Dynamic power management in a data center environment requires the
cognizance of the correlation between the system and hardware level performance
counters and the power consumption. Power consumption modeling exhibits this
correlation and is crucial in designing energy-efficient optimization
strategies based on resource utilization. Several works in power modeling are
proposed and used in the literature. However, these power models have been
evaluated using different benchmarking applications, power measurement
techniques and error calculation formula on different machines. In this work,
we present a taxonomy and evaluation of 24 software-based power models using a
unified environment, benchmarking applications, power measurement technique and
error formula, with the aim of achieving an objective comparison. We use
different servers architectures to assess the impact of heterogeneity on the
models' comparison. The performance analysis of these models is elaborated in
the paper
When Backpressure Meets Predictive Scheduling
Motivated by the increasing popularity of learning and predicting human user
behavior in communication and computing systems, in this paper, we investigate
the fundamental benefit of predictive scheduling, i.e., predicting and
pre-serving arrivals, in controlled queueing systems. Based on a lookahead
window prediction model, we first establish a novel equivalence between the
predictive queueing system with a \emph{fully-efficient} scheduling scheme and
an equivalent queueing system without prediction. This connection allows us to
analytically demonstrate that predictive scheduling necessarily improves system
delay performance and can drive it to zero with increasing prediction power. We
then propose the \textsf{Predictive Backpressure (PBP)} algorithm for achieving
optimal utility performance in such predictive systems. \textsf{PBP}
efficiently incorporates prediction into stochastic system control and avoids
the great complication due to the exponential state space growth in the
prediction window size. We show that \textsf{PBP} can achieve a utility
performance that is within of the optimal, for any ,
while guaranteeing that the system delay distribution is a
\emph{shifted-to-the-left} version of that under the original Backpressure
algorithm. Hence, the average packet delay under \textsf{PBP} is strictly
better than that under Backpressure, and vanishes with increasing prediction
window size. This implies that the resulting utility-delay tradeoff with
predictive scheduling beats the known optimal tradeoff for systems without prediction
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