Adaptive Power Management

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Contents

Vision

Improving efficiency of hardware components

Price of electricity

  • all larger data centers in northern California are charged for electricity using the E-19 or E-20 rate schedules; more details here
  • demand response programs, to get more details, go to the tariff book (link below) and search for the following tariff names: E-BIP, E-OBMC, E-SLRP, E-DBP, E-POBMC, E-CPP
  • tariff book

Data center power consumption

Related work

Server-level stuff

Thermal load-balancing

  • main idea: by either a) moving workload between servers, or b) directing cold air from AC units to hot parts of a data center, reduce the maximum temperature in the room. If we decrease the max temperature by (say) 3 degrees Celsius, we can increase the temperature coming from the AC units (by 3 degrees Celsius) and still keep the room cool. This way the AC units operate in a more efficient regime and save power.

Dynamic Voltage Scaling in servers

  • since most servers in data centers are underutilized, we could reduce the voltage/frequency of CPUs to reduce power consumption

References:

  • Ensemble-level Power Management for Dense Blade Servers (ISCA '06): [3]

Heterogeneous Chip Multiprocessors

Heterogeneous Chip Multiprocessors contain multiple cores, each having different capabilities and performance levels: the "smaller" cores are slower, but more power efficient, while the "bigger" cores are faster, but consumer more power. The authors propose to dynamically switch between cores depending on the application requirements; their evaluation shows that this technique could achieve significant power savings while sacrificing only little in performance.

References:

  • [4] (ISCA '04)
  • [5] (IEEE Computer, November '05)
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