Operating Systems and Architectural Techniques for
Power and Energy Conservation

Project Information

• Power and Energy Conservation for Servers
• Measurement and Analysis of Power and Energy
• Papers

Power and Energy Conservation for Servers

The power and energy requirements of server systems play an important role in determining both the installation and operational costs of data centers. In fact, data from several sources show that power and energy costs represent a significant fraction of the cost of data centers. For example, APC estimates that power equipment, cooling equipment, and electricity together are responsible for 63% of the total cost of ownership of the physical IT infrastructure of a data center. Perhaps more importantly however, power and energy management can help protect the environment, since most power-generation technologies (such as coal-based generation) have a negative impact on the environment.

Based on these observations, we have been working on operating systems and architectural techniques to limit power consumption and conserve energy in server systems.

Measurement and Analysis of Power and Energy

A complete and meaningful evaluation of power and energy conservation techniques depends on modeling and measuring the impact of these techniques in terms of power, energy, and performance. Modeling allows us to predict trends and extrapolate from actual measurements. Experimental measurements not only validate and provide paramaters to our models, but also allow us to understand the impact of technological trends and different harwdware and software configurations.

Based on these observations, we have been working on modeling the power and energy behavior of different computer systems (and their workloads), ranging from laptops to server clusters.

Papers

• L. Ramos and R. Bianchini. "C-Oracle: Predictive Thermal Management for Data Centers". Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA 14), February 2008. Earlier version published as Technical Report DCS-TR-617, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, September 2007.

• B. Diniz, D. Guedes, W. Meira Jr., and R. Bianchini. "Limiting the Power Consumption of Main Memory". Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2007. Earlier version published as Technical Report DCS-TR-603, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, June 2006, Revised November 2006.

• T. Heath, A. P. Centeno, P. George, L. Ramos, Y. Jaluria, and R. Bianchini. "Mercury and Freon: Temperature Emulation and Management for Server Systems". Proceedings of the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), October 2006. Earlier version published as Technical Report DCS-TR-596, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, January 2006.

• E. Pinheiro, R. Bianchini, and C. Dubnicki. "Exploiting Redundancy to Conserve Energy in Storage Systems". Proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS), June 2006. Earlier version published as Technical Report DCS-TR-570, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, March 2005, Revised November 2005.

• V. Pandey, W. Jiang, Y. Zhou, and R. Bianchini. "DMA-Aware Memory Energy Conservation". Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA 12), February 2006.

• T. Heath, B. Diniz, E. V. Carrera, W. Meira Jr., and R. Bianchini. "Energy Conservation in Heterogeneous Server Clusters". Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP), June 2005.

• R. Bianchini and R. Rajamony. "Power and Energy Management for Server Systems". IEEE Computer, volume 37, number 11, November 2004. Special issue on Internet data centers. Invited paper. Note that Computer made an editing mistake in our paper for their hard-copy issue. The paper you find here is the correct (and slightly expanded) version.

• T. Heath, E. Pinheiro, J. Hom, U. Kremer, and R. Bianchini. "Code Transformations for Energy-Efficient Device Management". IEEE Transactions on Computers, volume 53, number 8, August 2004.

• E. Pinheiro and R. Bianchini. "Energy Conservation Techniques for Disk Array-Based Servers". Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Supercomputing, June 2004. Earlier version published as Technical Report DCS-TR-525, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, May 2003.

• T. Heath, B. Diniz, E. V. Carrera, W. Meira Jr., and R. Bianchini. "Self-Configuring Heterogeneous Server Clusters". Proceedings of the Workshop on Compilers and Operating Systems for Low Power (COLP), September 2003.

• E. Pinheiro, R. Bianchini, E. V. Carrera, and T. Heath. "Dynamic Cluster Reconfiguration for Power and Performance". Compilers and Operating Systems for Low Power, Luca Benini, Mahmut Kandemir, and J. Ramanujam (eds.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, September 2003. This is a revised and improved version of the COLP'01 paper listed below.

• E. V. Carrera, E. Pinheiro, and R. Bianchini. "Conserving Disk Energy in Network Servers". Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Supercomputing, June 2003. Longer version published as Technical Report DCS-TR-511, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, November 2002, Revised March 2003.

• T. Heath, E. Pinheiro, J. Hom, U. Kremer, and R. Bianchini. "Application Transformations for Energy and Performance-Aware Device Management". Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques, September 2002. Best student paper award.

• T. Heath, E. Pinheiro, and R. Bianchini. "Application-Supported Device Management for Energy and Performance". Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 2325. Also appeared in Proceedings of the Workshop on Power-Aware Computer Systems, February 2002.

• E. Pinheiro, R. Bianchini, E. V. Carrera, and T. Heath. "Load Balancing and Unbalancing for Power and Performance in Cluster-Based Systems". Proceedings of the Workshop on Compilers and Operating Systems for Low Power (COLP), September 2001. Longer version published as Technical Report DCS-TR-440, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, May 2001.