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

A methodology for full-system power modeling in heterogeneous data centers

The need for energy-awareness in current data centers has encouraged the use of power modeling to estimate their power consumption. However, existing models present noticeable limitations, which make them application-dependent, platform-dependent, inaccurate, or computationally complex. In this paper, we propose a platform-and application-agnostic methodology for full-system power modeling in heterogeneous data centers that overcomes those limitations. It derives a single model per platform, which works with high accuracy for heterogeneous applications with different patterns of resource usage and energy consumption, by systematically selecting a minimum set of resource usage indicators and extracting complex relations among them that capture the impact on energy consumption of all the resources in the system. We demonstrate our methodology by generating power models for heterogeneous platforms with very different power consumption profiles. Our validation experiments with real Cloud applications show that such models provide high accuracy (around 5% of average estimation error).This work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under contract TIN2015-65316-P, by the Gener- alitat de Catalunya under contract 2014-SGR-1051, and by the European Commission under FP7-SMARTCITIES-2013 contract 608679 (RenewIT) and FP7-ICT-2013-10 contracts 610874 (AS- CETiC) and 610456 (EuroServer).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Joint Energy Efficient and QoS-aware Path Allocation and VNF Placement for Service Function Chaining

Service Function Chaining (SFC) allows the forwarding of a traffic flow along a chain of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs, e.g., IDS, firewall, and NAT). Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions can be used to support SFC reducing the management complexity and the operational costs. One of the most critical issues for the service and network providers is the reduction of energy consumption, which should be achieved without impact to the quality of services. In this paper, we propose a novel resource (re)allocation architecture which enables energy-aware SFC for SDN-based networks. To this end, we model the problems of VNF placement, allocation of VNFs to flows, and flow routing as optimization problems. Thereafter, heuristic algorithms are proposed for the different optimization problems, in order find near-optimal solutions in acceptable times. The performance of the proposed algorithms are numerically evaluated over a real-world topology and various network traffic patterns. The results confirm that the proposed heuristic algorithms provide near optimal solutions while their execution time is applicable for real-life networks.Comment: Extended version of submitted paper - v7 - July 201