Power consumption costs takes upto half of operational expenses of datacenters making power management a critical concern. Advances in processor technology provide fine-grained control over operating frequency and voltage of processors and this control can be used to tradeoff power for performance. Although many power and performance models exist, they have a significant error margin while predicting the performance of memory or file-intensive tasks and HPC applications. Our investigations reveal that the prediction error is due in part to the fact that they do not take frequency AND CPU variations account, rather they just depend on the CPU by itself. In this paper, we empirically derive power and completion time models using linear regression with CPU utilization and operating frequency as parameters. We validate our power model on several Intel and AMD processors by predicting within 2-7 of measured power. We validate our completion time model using five kernels of NASA Parallel Benchmark suite and five CPU, memory and file-intensive benchmarks on four heterogeneous systems and predicting within 1-6 of observed performance. We then show how these models can be employed to realize as much as 15 savings in power while delivering 44 better performance for applications deployed in a virtualized environment.
In the area of system architecture, there are two most significant trends: multi-core and system virtualization technology. Both of them have quite close relationship with energy efficient computing. Industry turns to integrate more cores on a single chip instead of increasing frequency to solve the heat problem. Meanwhile system virtualization could decrease the total power consumption by sharing the same platform among different operating systems. So the necessity of power management on the multi-core virtualization platform has become increasingly evident. However, traditional virtual machine monitor schedulers could not make efficient use of DVFS, and thus could not take it into considering that the guest OSes may run at different frequency. In order to address this problem, this paper designs a power efficient scheduler which uses the load and the power level of the guest OSes as feedback, and implements a prototype based on Xen virtual machine monitor. This scheduler allocates power credit to VCPU of each guest OS, accounts the power consumption of VCPU sat different speed levels and makes scheduler decision by integrating it to the credit oriented to CPU time slice sharing. It also uses utilization of processors as feedback and sets frequency according to the load change trends instead of the simple static relationship between load and frequency policies, so as to decrease the speed steps required by response to burst load change. Experiment results show that the scheduling fairness of guest OS improved when using DVFS as main power saving method, and the power consumption of the whole system can be reduced by 5 percent - 30 percent. Therefore, this framework for feedback scheduling could make efficient use of varieties of power saving methods and maintain ideal balance between overall system power saving and single core over heat. Nowadays, virtualization is present in almost all computing infrastructures. Thanks to server consolidation and VM migration, virtualization helps in power reduction. However, modern powerful computers with higher processor frequency, multiple cores and multiple CPUs constitute the main factor contributing to the continuously increase of energy consumption in numerous computing infrastructures. In this context, energy management takes a critical importance. A hardware technology, called Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), serves to dynamically modify the processor frequency (according to the CPU needs) in order to achieve less energy consumption. However, lowering frequency also generates poor virtual machine (VM) performance. In this paper, we propose a solution consisting of an extended VM scheduler and DVFS, and report some experiments based on this proposal. This enhanced scheduler, according to VM CPU load, dynamically scales processor frequency in order to save energy. The idea is to adapt the current VM scheduler to analyze CPU load, and modify the current processor frequency to the lowest possible, but still support the guaranteed VM performance. The algorithm is designed and simulated on a web server as the sample application and Xen as the virtualization platform. Test results and performance evaluations prove our design and implementation. Power management has become increasingly necessary in large-scale datacenters to address costs and limitations in cooling or power delivery. This paper explores how to integrate power management mechanisms and policies with the virtualization technologies being actively deployed in these environments. The goals of the proposed VirtualPower approach to online power management are (i) to support the isolated and independent operation assumed by guest virtual machines (VMs) running on virtualized platforms and (ii) to make it possible to control and globally coordinate the effects of the diverse power management policies applied by these VMs to virtualized resources. To attain these goals, VirtualPower extends to guest VMs soft' versions of the hardware power states for which their policies are designed. The resulting technical challenge is to appropriately map VM-level updates made to soft power states to actual changes in the states or in the allocation of underlying virtualized hardware. An implementation of VirtualPower Management (VPM) for the Xen hypervisor addresses this challenge by provision of multiple system-level abstractions including VPM states, channels, mechanisms, and rules. Experimental evaluations on modern multicore platforms highlight resulting improvements in online power management capabilities, including minimization of power consumption with little or no performance penalties and the ability to throttle power consumption while still meeting application requirements. Finally, coordination of online methods for server consolidation with VPM management techniques in heterogeneous server systems is shown to provide up to 34 improvements in power consumption.