Paper Info
Title
Energy Proportional Servers: Where Are We In 2016?
Abstract
The huge energy consumption in data centers produces not only high electricity bill but also tremendous carbon footprints. Although today's servers and data centers of leading internet companies are more energy efficient than ever before, the fluctuations in external workload and internal resource utilization calls for energy proportional computing. Insight into server energy proportionality can help improve workload placement while also reducing energy consumption. In this paper, we investigate all 477 valid published results of SPECpower_ssj benchmark from 2007 to 2016Q3 and reorganize them by hardware availability year for more accurate analysis on production servers. Through comprehensive analysis we find that: (1) The specious stagnation of energy proportionality in recent years is mainly caused by the adoption of processors of specific microarchitecture and is not the indicative trend of energy proportionality improvement. (2) Microarchitecture evolution has more influence on energy efficiency improvement than energy proportionality. (3) Today's servers' peak energy efficiencies are shifting from 100% resource utilization to 800/0 or 70% utilization and server enerigy proportionality improves with such shifting. We then conduct extensive experiments on 4 rack servers to investigate the energy efficiency variations under different hardware configurations, including memory per core installation and processor frequency scaling. Our experiments show that hardware configuration has significant impact on server's energy efficiency. Our findings presented in this paper provide useful insights and guidance to system designers, as well as data center operators for energy proportionality aware workload placement and energy savings.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/ICDCS.2017.285
2017 IEEE 37TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SYSTEMS (ICDCS 2017)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Energy Proportionality, Energy Efficiency, Servers, SPECpower_ssj, Data Centers
Efficient energy use,Computer science,Server,Energy proportional computing,Frequency scaling,SPECpower,Energy accounting,Data center,Energy consumption,Distributed computing
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1063-6927
0
0.34
References 
Authors
36
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Congfeng Jiang1102.93
Wang Yumei22313.46
Dongyang Ou321.74
Bing Luo4476.08
Weisong Shi52323163.09