Multi-mode energy management for multi-tier server clusters

Abstract

This paper presents an energy management policy for reconfigurable clusters running a multi-tier application, exploiting DVS together with multiple sleep states. We develop a theoretical analysis of the corresponding power optimization problem and design an algorithm around the solution. Moreover, we rigorously investigate selection of the optimal number of spare servers for each power state, a problem that has only been approached in an ad-hoc manner in current policies. To validate our results and policies, we implement them on an actual multi-tier server cluster where nodes support all power management techniques considered. Experimental results using realistic dynamic workloads based on the TPC-W benchmark show that exploiting multiple sleep states results in significant additional cluster-wide energy savings up to 23% with little or no performance degradation.