Energy-Efficient Cluster Computing via Accurate Workload Characterization

This paper presents an eco-friendly daemon that reduces power and energy consumption while better maintaining high performance via an accurate workload characterization that infers "processor stall cycles due to off-chip activities." The eco-friendly daemon is an interval-based, run-time algorithm that uses the workload characterization to dynamically adjust a processor's frequency and voltage to reduce power and energy consumption with little impact on application performance. Using the NAS Parallel Benchmarks as our workload, we then evaluate our eco-friendly daemon on a cluster computer. The results indicate that our workload characterization allows the power-aware daemon to more tightly control performance (5% loss instead of 11%) while delivering substantial energy savings (11% instead of 8%).

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CCGRID
• Authors: S. Huang, W. Feng
• Keywords: Accurate Workload Characterization, CCGRID 2009, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Eco-friendly Daemon, Workload Characterization