Towards software-adaptive green computing based on server power consumption.

ABSTRACT With the proliferation of virtualization and cloud comput- ing, optimizing the power usage effectiveness of enterprise data centers has become a laudable goal and a critical re- quirement in IT operations all over the world. While a sig- nificant body of research exists to measure, monitor, and control the greenness level of hardware components, signif- icant research efforts are needed to relate hardware energy consumption to energy consumption due to program exe- cution. In this paper we report on our investigations to characterize power consumption profiles for different types of compute and memory intensive software applications. In particular, we focus on studying the effects of CPU loads on the power consumption of compute servers by monitoring rack power consumption in a data center. We conducted a series of experiments with a variety of processes of differ- ent complexity to understand and characterize the effect on power consumption. Combining processes of varying com- plexity with varying resource allocations produces different energy consumption levels. The challenge is to optimize pro- cess orchestration based on a power consumption framework to accrue energy savings. Our ultimate goal is to develop smart adaptive green computing techniques, such as adap- tive job scheduling and resource provisioning, to reduce over- all power consumption in data centers or clouds.