Exploring interconnect energy savings under east-west traffic pattern of mapreduce clusters

An important challenge of modern data centers is to reduce energy consumption, of which a substantial proportion is due to the network. Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) is a recent standard that aims to reduce network power consumption, but current practice is to disable it in production use, since it has a poorly understood impact on real world application performance. An important application framework commonly used in modern data centers is Apache Hadoop, which implements the MapReduce programming model. This paper is the first to analyse the impact of EEE on MapReduce workloads, in terms of performance overheads and energy savings. We find that optimum energy savings are possible if the links use packet coalescing. Packet coalescing must, however, be carefully configured in order to avoid excessive performance degradation.