Energy efficiency in large-scale distributed computing systems

The ever-increasing energy consumption in large-scale distributed computing systems such as clusters, grids and clouds raises social, technical, economical, and environmental concerns. Therefore, designing novel energy-efficient approaches, to reduce energy consumption, at all levels of distributed system architecture is of great importance for the whole society. However, the essential step towards the introduction of energy-efficiency in large-scale distributed systems is to measure the power consumption, accurately, reliably, and continually in each component of the system. This paper briefly surveys the current approaches for measuring and profiling power consumption in large scale distributed systems. Furthermore, the practical case study of a real-time power measurement in multi-core computing system, as a basic building block of a distributed computing system, is presented.