A Power-Aware Based Storage Architecture for High Performance Computing

The energy crisis of the last years and the ever increasing conscience about the negative effects of energy waste on the climate change have brought the sustainability both into public attention, industry, and scientific scrutiny. Energy demand has been increasing in many subsystems, specially in data centers and supercomputers. This paper considers the problem of saving energy on storage systems taking advantage of SSD devices. SSDs and magnetic disk devices offer different power characteristics, being SSD devices much less power consuming than conventional magnetic disk devices. We propose a novel power saving solution based on SSD devices, namely SSD-PASS. Our storage system obtains benefits of permanent caching on SSDs in storage nodes. Nowadays we can find solutions that do not consider the viability and feasibility of the SSD-based storage systems, in terms of monetary cost. We present a cost analysis and evaluate our proposed architecture, in terms of saved energy and performance. Our cost model takes into account magnetic disk and SSD devices reliability metrics, current energy prices, and replacement costs. The experimental results demonstrate that our solution achieves a significant reduction in energy consumption and subsequent monetary savings by up to 66%. We have evaluated the proposed approach with realistic workloads of three well-known HPC applications.