Towards energy-efficient storage servers

Abstract

As large-scale parallel platforms are deployed to comply with the increasing performance requirements of scientific applications, a new concern is getting the attention of the HPC community: the power consumption. In this paper, we aim at evaluating the viability of using low-power architectures as file systems servers in HPC environments, since processing power is of less importance for these servers. We present a performance and energy efficiency study of such low-power servers when compared to conventional architectures. Our results indicate that the low-power alternative could be a viable choice to save energy by up to 85+ while not compromising on performance, specially for read-intensive workloads. We show the low-power server provides 7 times more energy efficiency to the system while running a real application from the seismic wave propagation field.