Willow: A Control System for Energy and Thermal Adaptive Computing

Abstract

The increasing energy demand coupled with emerging sustainability concerns requires a re-examination of power/thermal issues in data centers from the perspective of short term energy deficiencies. Such energy deficient scenarios arise for a variety of reasons including variable energy supply from renewable sources and inadequate power, thermal and cooling capacities. In this paper we propose a hierarchical control scheme to adapt assignments of tasks to servers in a way that can cope with the varying energy limitations and still provide necessary QoS. The rescheduling of tasks on different servers has direct (migration related) and indirect (changed traffic patterns) network energy impacts that we also consider. We show the stability of our scheme and evaluate its performance via detailed simulations and experiments.