Towards energy-proportional computing for enterprise-class server workloads
Balaji Subramaniam, Wu-chun Feng · 2013
Massive data centers housing thousands of computing nodes have become commonplace in enterprise computing, and the power consumption of such data centers is growing at an unprecedented rate. Adding to the problem is the inability of the servers to exhibit energy proportionality, i.e., provide energy-efficient execution under all levels of utilization, which diminishes the overall energy efficiency of the data center. It is imperative that we realize effective strategies to control the power consumption of the server and improve the energy efficiency of data centers. With the advent of Intel Sandy Bridge processors, we have the ability to specify a limit on power consumption during runtime, which creates opportunities to design new power-management techniques for enterprise workloads and make the systems that they run on more energy proportional.