Coordinated management of power usage and runtime performance

With the continued growth of computing power and reduction in physical size of enterprise servers, the need for actively managing electrical power usage in large datacenters is becoming ever more pressing. By far the greatest savings in electrical power can be effected by dynamically consolidating workload onto the minimum number of servers needed at a given time and powering off the remainder. However, simple schemes for achieving this goal fail to cope with the complexities of realistic usage scenarios. In this paper we present a combined power-and performance-management system that builds on a state-of-the-art performance manager to achieve significant power savings without unacceptable loss of performance. In our system, the degree to which performance may be traded off against power is itself adjustable using a small number of easily-understood parameters, permitting administrators in different facilities to select the optimal tradeoff for their needs. We characterize the power saved, the effects of the tradeoff between power and performance, and the changes in behavior as the tradeoff parameters are adjusted, both in simulation and in a sample deployment of the real system.