Power-Saving Design for Server Farms with Response Time Percentile Guarantees

The expense of power cost in server farms has driven the recent power-aware development in both industry and academia. At the same time, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of service performance between a customer and a service provider is demanded to meet the customer satisfaction. This paper investigates the queueing-theoretical power-saving design strategy for server farms under a given SLA, which in particular is measured in a certain level percentile of the job response time. We consider server farms with servers that are equipped with the capabilities of Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVFS) and Dynamic Power Management (DPM). We adopt an M/G/1/PS server model, where the job service time distribution is assumed heavy-tailed, as discovered and validated by previous research. We propose a design strategy called Power Tail to minimize the power consumption under the given SLA. Our data confirms that the proposed PowerTail strategy indeed provides statistical guarantee in comparison with existing dynamic DVFS approaches and significantly outperforms the intuitive load-balancing strategy.