Dynamic voltage/frequency scaling for power reduction in data centers: Enough or not?

Power consumption is becoming a critical and annoying problem to data centers (DCs). Higher power consumption results in more heat dissipation, cooling costs and makes servers more prone to failures. Various excellent workload and application-specific dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVS/DFS) algorithms have been proposed and deployed in many computing systems for power reduction and system reliabilities. However, there also exist some disadvantages associated with individual DVS/DFS algorithms when they are ported to DCs, where virtualization technologies and emerging multi-core processors are widely deployed. In this paper, we discuss several aspects and characteristics of DVS/DFS algorithms, e.g. performance, overheads, feasibility and usability in data centers. This paper also presents a discussion on the challenges of power reduction in large data centers.