Towards Energy Efficient Workload Placement in Data Centers Rania Elnaggar, Portland State University rania.elnaggar@gmail.com Abstract. A new era of computing is being defined by a shift to aggregate computing resources into large-scale data centers (DCs) that are shared by a global pool of users. In this paradigm, DCs' operational energy costs are a rising concern as they continue an upward trend that is poised to surpass the capital cost of equipment in a typical lifetime usage model. A DC is a complex distributed system comprised of a hierarchy of numerous components; thus, power and energy management can be performed at many levels of granularity and through various techniques. We contend that the energy efficiency problem in DCs should be addressed through a holistic, endto-end approach that accounts for the many, and sometimes-conflicting, parameters. In this paper, we discuss workload placement strategies as a model for a holistic approach. Earlier research that addressed workload placement, capitalized on a maximumidle approach that seeks to maximize both spatial and temporal idleness. We show that the underlying concept for that approach does not hold as a basis for energy-efficient placement; we investigate current and future system power expenditure with respect to system load and analyze the contributing factors. We then utilize our analysis to introduce a framework for energy-efficient load placement strategies in DCs. Comparing our approach to maximum-idle-based placement shows gains in compute energy efficiency. Finally, we discuss how our new approach affects DC thermals and the energy required for cooling. 1 Introduction Energy efficiency of has always been a first-class design goal in the mobile and embedded fields due to battery-life limitations. However, until recently, it has been less of a concern for servers and data centers. We witnessed waves of interest in DC energy efficiency with the advent of new technologies such as WWW, clusters, grid, utility compute models. The interest is now renewed with the inception of Cloud Computing [2] [8], given the massive scale anticipated in future DCs. Cloud Computing is charcterized by a move to aggregate computing resources (in terms of hardware, software and services) into large-scale data centers that are shared by a global pool of users. Those data centers are typically owned and run by third-party entities and export a wide array of services and applications ranging from individual consumer-oriented services to enterprise-class offerings.
In this new paradigm, computing energy costs are a rising concern. This is especially the case in DCs where energy costs continue an upward trend that is poised to surpass the cost of the equipment itself in a typical lifetime usage model [6]. In 2005, DCs consumed an estimated total of about 50 billion kwh in the U.S., and around 130 billion kwh for the world. These figures accounted for 1.2% and 0.8% of the total electricity consumption of the U.S. and the world respectively [24]. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that if current energy-efficiency trends continue, DCs will consume more than 120 billion kwh in the U.S. alone [13]. While cutting down operational costs of data centers is a chief concern, the environmental impact of this spiraling computing energy expenditure is equivalently important. It is projected that improving DC efficiency beyond current trends can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 15 to 47 million metric tons in 2011 [13]. A data center is a complex entity that can be partitioned into two inter-dependent systems; the IT system and the facilities system. The IT system is comprised of compute related parts such as servers, networks and management components. The facilities system delivers the power and cooling needed by IT equipment as well as other facilities overhead such as lighting. As servers performance grows, they generate increasing amounts of heat [3] which in turn demands progressively demand more cooling [6]. In fact, cooling and power delivery energy expenditure already surpasses compute energy use in a great percentage of data centers [6]. DCs are usually cooled using Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) units, and are typically arranged in a hot-aisle, cold-aisle configuration [47]. In this paper we contend that achieving improved energy-efficiency for a DC should be driven by a holistic that takes into consideration all system components to achieve maximum synergetic energy savings. This strategy governs a set of local policies and protocols that effectively use existing power-saving features within each system component in a way that is proportional to the workload of the component and of the overall system. Though ultimately, we are interested in defining an end-to-end global energy optimization strategy over a generalized model of a multi-level distributed system, the focus of our short-term research effort is on defining such a strategy for DCs, as a key subset of the larger problem. We consider a DC workload that is a mix of online and offline workloads that are mostly characterized as massively parallel, or throughputoriented. In defining such strategies, we will initially examine just the compute-related part of the DC, thus excluding networking, cooling and power delivery overheads. While we recognize that these overheads are critically important, we also observe that, in many cases, they are proportional to computing power expenditure in modern data centers. Expanding our work to explicitly consider those other components is a topic for future research. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In section 2 we present research background and review related work. In section 3 we present our hypotheses and outline an investigation methodology. In section 4 we present results and analysis. In section 5 we introduce a framework for energy efficient workload placement. In section 6 we conclude the paper and present direction for future research.
2 Background A DC s compute system is comprised of a hierarchy of components of different scale, where power management can be performed at many levels of that hierarchy, as shown in Fig. 1 below. Fig. 1.. Scale and hierarchy of power management in a DC We recognize three power-related attributes that affect the average power consumption for each component, as well as, the overall system; namely: peak power, idle power and dynamic power range. Peak power is the power consumed at the maximum workload of a component. Idle power is the power consumed when a component has no workload but is powered-on and active, thus has low-latency latency response to increasing workload. The dynamic power range defines the distance between peak power and idle power, and it is desirable for it to scale proportionally to the workload of the component [3]. When addressing the power consumption problem in a DC, we identify two main cost components: the capital cost of power provisioning in the infrastructure, and the operational power cost during the life span of the DC. The capital cost component is directly related to expected maximum power consumption and is a pressing issue as more DCs are built and typically amortized over an average of 15 years. Large DC operators such as Google are exploring ways to cut down on that cost through a workload mix that keeps maximum utilization within a decreased power envelope [13]. Decreasing operational power, however, is our area of interest and of a large body of other research. Approaches to decrease operational (also termed average) power have focused on the three power attributes we identified earlier. The solutions proposed can be broadly classified into three categories: scaling solutions that track utilization levels; sleep solutions that shut off parts of the system at low utilization; and hybrid solutions that combine the two former approaches. On the component level, Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) has been widely researched and applied to CPUs in particular as they consume a large percentage of the overall system power. Also, clock gating and system sleep states have been introduced for various platform components. These techniques have been utilized in wide-spread commercial products such as those produced by Intel [22] and AMD [1]. The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) [20] was defined to standardize power management for different platforms. Use of heterogeneous cores and accelerators has also been explored to enhance energy efficiency [27], and the use of operating system timers has been scrutinized to enable longer periods of uninterrupted sleep [44]. Conserving disk drive related energy consumption has also been explored through scaled-speed and sleep modes [9]. In the computer networks domain, the concept of maximizing idleness through sleep states has also been the corner stone of a large body of research that includes
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