The case for practical multi-resource and multi-level scheduling based on Energy/Utility

Energy has become the dominating concern for resource management. We advocate an energy-centered design approach for resource-management systems. To this end, we structure systems in layers, where layers implement higher-level resources using lower-level ones. For each layer, we describe the relation of the performance delivered for the higher layer to its demands on the lower layer and refer to that relation as demand/performance function. The lowest layers are rooted in hardware and express demand in terms of energy, the highest layers provide performance in terms of user-specific utility, thus leading to an Energy/Utility characterization of a complete system. We describe the overall approach, some research challenges and few initial results on the representation of demand/performance functions.