Charles J. Williams

Managing cost, performance, and reliability tradeoffs for energy-aware server provisioning

We present ACES, an automated server provisioning system that aims to meet workload demand while minimizing energy consumption in data centers. To perform energy-aware server provisioning, ACES faces three key tradeoffs between cost, performance, and reliability: (1) maximizing energy savings vs. minimizing unmet load demand, (2) managing low power draw vs. high transition latencies for multiple power management schemes, and (3) balancing energy savings vs. reliability costs of server components due to on-off cycles. To address these challenges, ACES (1) predicts demand in the near future to turn on servers gradually before they are needed and avoids turning on unnecessary servers to cope with transient load spikes, (2) formulates an optimization problem that minimizes a linear combination of unmet demand and total energy and reliability costs, and uses the program structure to solve the problem efficiently in practice, and (3) constructs an execution plan based on the optimization decisions to transition servers between different power states and actuates them using system and load management interfaces. Our evaluation on three data center workloads shows that ACESs energy savings are close to the optimal and it delivers power proportionality while balancing the tradeoff between energy savings and reliability costs.