Power Provisioning for a Warehouse-sized Computer
Venue
The 34th ACM International Symposium on Computer Architecture (2007)
Publication Year
2007
Authors
Xiaobo Fan, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, Luiz André Barroso
BibTeX
Abstract
In this paper we present the aggregate power usage characteristics of large collections of servers (up to 15 thousand) for different classes of applications over a period of approximately six months. Those observations allow us to evaluate opportunities for maximizing the use of the deployed power capacity of datacenters, and assess the risks of over-subscribing it. We find that even in well-tuned applications there is a noticeable gap (7 - 16%) between achieved and theoretical aggregate peak power usage at the cluster level (thousands of servers). The gap grows to almost 40% in whole datacenters. This headroom can be used to deploy additional compute equipment within the same power budget with minimal risk of exceeding it. We use our modeling framework to estimate the potential of power management schemes to reduce peak power and energy usage. We find that the opportunities for power and energy savings are significant, but greater at the cluster-level (thousands of servers) than at the rack-level (tens). Finally we argue that systems need to be power efficient across the activity range, and not only at peak performance levels.
