Distributed Energy Adaptive Computing

Fueled by burgeoning online services, power and thermal issues are becoming crucial both in terms of utility costs and environmental impact. In this paper, we motivate an approach that puts power/thermal issues at the heart of distributed computing, and strives to alter the behavior of the computation in order to dynamically adjust to changing energy constraints. The paper discusses three distributed energy adaptation paradigms and shows why they are essential for sustainable computing. The paper also compares and contrasts two basic techniques for energy adaptation in servers, namely power capping and use of sleep modes.