Power Management Techniques for Data Centers: A Survey

With growing use of internet and exponential growth in amount of data to be stored and processed (known as 'big data'), the size of data centers has greatly increased. This, however, has resulted in significant increase in the power consumption of the data centers. For this reason, managing power consumption of data centers has become essential. In this paper, we highlight the need of achieving energy efficiency in data centers and survey several recent architectural techniques designed for power management of data centers. We also present a classification of these techniques based on their characteristics. This paper aims to provide insights into the techniques for improving energy efficiency of data centers and encourage the designers to invent novel solutions for managing the large power dissipation of data centers.Comment: Keywords: Data Centers, Power Management, Low-power Design, Energy Efficiency, Green Computing, DVFS, Server Consolidatio

Cloud computing: survey on energy efficiency

International audienceCloud computing is today’s most emphasized Information and Communications Technology (ICT) paradigm that is directly or indirectly used by almost every online user. However, such great significance comes with the support of a great infrastructure that includes large data centers comprising thousands of server units and other supporting equipment. Their share in power consumption generates between 1.1% and 1.5% of the total electricity use worldwide and is projected to rise even more. Such alarming numbers demand rethinking the energy efficiency of such infrastructures. However, before making any changes to infrastructure, an analysis of the current status is required. In this article, we perform a comprehensive analysis of an infrastructure supporting the cloud computing paradigm with regards to energy efficiency. First, we define a systematic approach for analyzing the energy efficiency of most important data center domains, including server and network equipment, as well as cloud management systems and appliances consisting of a software utilized by end users. Second, we utilize this approach for analyzing available scientific and industrial literature on state-of-the-art practices in data centers and their equipment. Finally, we extract existing challenges and highlight future research directions

On energy consumption of switch-centric data center networks

Data center network (DCN) is the core of cloud computing and accounts for 40% energy spend when compared to cooling system, power distribution and conversion of the whole data center (DC) facility. It is essential to reduce the energy consumption of DCN to esnure energy-efficient (green) data center can be achieved. An analysis of DC performance and efficiency emphasizing the effect of bandwidth provisioning and throughput on energy proportionality of two most common switch-centric DCN topologies: three-tier (3T) and fat tree (FT) based on the amount of actual energy that is turned into computing power are presented. Energy consumption of switch-centric DCNs by realistic simulations is analyzed using GreenCloud simulator. Power related metrics were derived and adapted for the information technology equipment (ITE) processes within the DCN. These metrics are acknowledged as subset of the major metrics of power usage effectiveness (PUE) and data center infrastructure efficiency (DCIE), known to DCs. This study suggests that despite in overall FT consumes more energy, it spends less energy for transmission of a single bit of information, outperforming 3T

Design Space Exploration and Resource Management of Multi/Many-Core Systems

The increasing demand of processing a higher number of applications and related data on computing platforms has resulted in reliance on multi-/many-core chips as they facilitate parallel processing. However, there is a desire for these platforms to be energy-efficient and reliable, and they need to perform secure computations for the interest of the whole community. This book provides perspectives on the aforementioned aspects from leading researchers in terms of state-of-the-art contributions and upcoming trends

ThermoSim: Deep Learning based Framework for Modeling and Simulation of Thermal-aware Resource Management for Cloud Computing Environments

Current cloud computing frameworks host millions of physical servers that utilize cloud computing resources in the form of different virtual machines. Cloud Data Center (CDC) infrastructures require significant amounts of energy to deliver large scale computational services. Moreover, computing nodes generate large volumes of heat, requiring cooling units in turn to eliminate the effect of this heat. Thus, overall energy consumption of the CDC increases tremendously for servers as well as for cooling units. However, current workload allocation policies do not take into account effect on temperature and it is challenging to simulate the thermal behavior of CDCs. There is a need for a thermal-aware framework to simulate and model the behavior of nodes and measure the important performance parameters which can be affected by its temperature. In this paper, we propose a lightweight framework, ThermoSim, for modeling and simulation of thermal-aware resource management for cloud computing environments. This work presents a Recurrent Neural Network based deep learning temperature predictor for CDCs which is utilized by ThermoSim for lightweight resource management in constrained cloud environments. ThermoSim extends the CloudSim toolkit helping to analyze the performance of various key parameters such as energy consumption, service level agreement violation rate, number of virtual machine migrations and temperature during the management of cloud resources for execution of workloads. Further, different energy-aware and thermal-aware resource management techniques are tested using the proposed ThermoSim framework in order to validate it against the existing framework (Thas). The experimental results demonstrate the proposed framework is capable of modeling and simulating the thermal behavior of a CDC and ThermoSim framework is better than Thas in terms of energy consumption, cost, time, memory usage and prediction accuracy

Adaptive Knobs for Resource Efficient Computing

Performance demands of emerging domains such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and vision, Internet-of-things etc., continue to grow. Meeting such requirements on modern multi/many core systems with higher power densities, fixed power and energy budgets, and thermal constraints exacerbates the run-time management challenge. This leaves an open problem on extracting the required performance within the power and energy limits, while also ensuring thermal safety. Existing architectural solutions including asymmetric and heterogeneous cores and custom acceleration improve performance-per-watt in specific design time and static scenarios. However, satisfying applications’ performance requirements under dynamic and unknown workload scenarios subject to varying system dynamics of power, temperature and energy requires intelligent run-time management. Adaptive strategies are necessary for maximizing resource efficiency, considering i) diverse requirements and characteristics of concurrent applications, ii) dynamic workload variation, iii) core-level heterogeneity and iv) power, thermal and energy constraints. This dissertation proposes such adaptive techniques for efficient run-time resource management to maximize performance within fixed budgets under unknown and dynamic workload scenarios. Resource management strategies proposed in this dissertation comprehensively consider application and workload characteristics and variable effect of power actuation on performance for pro-active and appropriate allocation decisions. Specific contributions include i) run-time mapping approach to improve power budgets for higher throughput, ii) thermal aware performance boosting for efficient utilization of power budget and higher performance, iii) approximation as a run-time knob exploiting accuracy performance trade-offs for maximizing performance under power caps at minimal loss of accuracy and iv) co-ordinated approximation for heterogeneous systems through joint actuation of dynamic approximation and power knobs for performance guarantees with minimal power consumption. The approaches presented in this dissertation focus on adapting existing mapping techniques, performance boosting strategies, software and dynamic approximations to meet the performance requirements, simultaneously considering system constraints. The proposed strategies are compared against relevant state-of-the-art run-time management frameworks to qualitatively evaluate their efficacy

Modeling and optimization of high-performance many-core systems for energy-efficient and reliable computing

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityMany-core systems, ranging from small-scale many-core processors to large-scale high performance computing (HPC) data centers, have become the main trend in computing system design owing to their potential to deliver higher throughput per watt. However, power densities and temperatures increase following the growth in the performance capacity, and bring major challenges in energy efficiency, cooling costs, and reliability. These challenges require a joint assessment of performance, power, and temperature tradeoffs as well as the design of runtime optimization techniques that monitor and manage the interplay among them. This thesis proposes novel modeling and runtime management techniques that evaluate and optimize the performance, energy, and reliability of many-core systems. We first address the energy and thermal challenges in 3D-stacked many-core processors. 3D processors with stacked DRAM have the potential to dramatically improve performance owing to lower memory access latency and higher bandwidth. However, the performance increase may cause 3D systems to exceed the power budgets or create thermal hot spots. In order to provide an accurate analysis and enable the design of efficient management policies, this thesis introduces a simulation framework to jointly analyze performance, power, and temperature for 3D systems. We then propose a runtime optimization policy that maximizes the system performance by characterizing the application behavior and predicting the operating points that satisfy the power and thermal constraints. Our policy reduces the energy-delay product (EDP) by up to 61.9% compared to existing strategies. Performance, cooling energy, and reliability are also critical aspects in HPC data centers. In addition to causing reliability degradation, high temperatures increase the required cooling energy. Communication cost, on the other hand, has a significant impact on system performance in HPC data centers. This thesis proposes a topology-aware technique that maximizes system reliability by selecting between workload clustering and balancing. Our policy improves the system reliability by up to 123.3% compared to existing temperature balancing approaches. We also introduce a job allocation methodology to simultaneously optimize the communication cost and the cooling energy in a data center. Our policy reduces the cooling cost by 40% compared to cooling-aware and performance-aware policies, while achieving comparable performance to performance-aware policy