Energy-aware service execution

The energy consumption of ICT infrastructures has increased considerably in the recent years. This has resulted in extensive research on dynamic power management strategies as well as data centre design and placement. The main problem with most of the proposed or existing approaches is that they do not fully take the distributed nature of and strong logical dependencies between executed services into account. However, without a comprehensive knowledge of the wider relationships between services, local power management strategies may be ineffectual or can even result in high aggregate energy cost. Understanding this relationship is useful for fine-grained energy-aware computing. For example, services that run on underutilised servers can be stopped or seamlessly migrated to other servers, so that the underutilised servers can be turned off. Alternatively, a re-binding process can be used if the cost of service migration is high. Such advantages can be fully exploited if the dependency between services is properly understood and meaningfully modelled. This paper introduces a conceptual architecture for an energy-aware service execution platform and compares three optimisation mechanisms to support dynamic service migration and rebinding.