Exploiting Platform Heterogeneity for Power Efficient Data Centers

It has recently become clear that power management is of critical importance in modern enterprise computing environments. The traditional drive for higher performance has influenced trends towards consolidation and higher densities, artifacts enabled by virtualization and new small form factor server blades. The resulting effect has been increased power and cooling requirements in data centers which elevate ownership costs and put more pressure on rack and enclosure densities. To address these issues, in this paper, we enable power-efficient management of enterprise workloads by exploiting a fundamental characteristic of data centers: "platform heterogeneity". This heterogeneity stems from the architectural and management-capability variations of the underlying platforms. We define an intelligent workload allocation method that leverages heterogeneity characteristics and efficiently maps workloads to the best fitting platforms, significantly improving the power efficiency of the whole data center. We perform this allocation by employing a novel analytical prediction layer that accurately predicts workload power/performance across different platform architectures and power management capabilities. This prediction infrastructure relies upon platform and workload descriptors that we define as part of our work. Our allocation scheme achieves on average 20% improvements in power efficiency for representative heterogeneous data center configurations, highlighting the significant potential of heterogeneity-aware management.