Blink: managing server clusters on intermittent power

Reducing the energy footprint of data centers continues to receive significant attention due to both its financial and environmental impact. There are numerous methods that limit the impact of both factors, such as expanding the use of renewable energy or participating in automated demand-response programs. To take advantage of these methods, servers and applications must gracefully handle intermittent constraints in their power supply. In this paper, we propose blinking—metered transitions between a highpower active state and a low-power inactive state—as the primary ion for conforming to intermittent power constraints. We design Blink, an application-independent hardware-software platform for developing and evaluating blinking applications, and define multiple types of blinking policies. We then use Blink to design BlinkCache, a blinking version of memcached, to demonstrate the effect of blinking on an example application. Our results show that a load-proportional blinking po...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Navin Sharma, Sean Barker, David Irwin, Prashant J. Shenoy
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2011, Computer System Implementation, Power Constraints, Power Signals, Programming Languages