Power and energy containers for multicore servers

Energy efficiency and power capping remain growing concerns in server systems. Online applications continue to evolve with new features and dynamic clientdirected processing, resulting in varying power profiles. New computing platforms with multicore resource sharing and heterogeneity further obfuscate the system behaviors, presenting challenges for request/client-based energy accounting, identification and control of power viruses, as well as energy-efficient load management. This paper presents a new operating system facility we call “power and energy containers” that accounts for and controls the power/energy usage of individual finegrained requests in multicore servers. Our power and energy containers are enabled by three techniques— 1) online attribution of multicore power (including shared maintenance power) to individual tasks running concurrently on the multicore, 2) alignment of actual power measurements and model estimates to enable online model recalibration, and...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Kai Shen, Arrvindh Shriraman, Sandhya Dwarkadas, Xiao Zhang
• Keywords: Hardware, Intel Woodcrest, National Science Foundation, Power Virus, SIGMETRICS 2012