Power phase variation in a commercial server workload

ABSTRACT

Many techniques have been developed for adaptive power management of computing systems. These techniques rely on the presence of varying power phases to detect opportunities for adaptation. However, little information is available regarding the extent of power phases in real systems. This paper illustrates available power phases ranging from 1 millisecond to 1 second using a commercial workload running on enterprise class hardware. Data is obtained using a server instrumented for power measurement at the subsystem level. The analysis shows that chipset, memory and disk subsystems have the most homogenous phase behavior with greater than 71% of samples within phases of 100 milliseconds or shorter. In contrast, CPU and I/O subsystems have much more variation with only 26% of samples within phases of 10 milliseconds or shorter.

REFERENCES

• 1: Yiyu Chen , Amitayu Das , Wubi Qin , Anand Sivasubramaniam , Qian Wang , Natarajan Gautam, Managing server energy and operational costs in hosting centers, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems, June 06-10, 2005, Banff, Alberta, Canada
• 2: W. L. Bircher , M. Valluri , J. Law , L. K. John, Runtime identification of microprocessor energy saving opportunities, Proceedings of the 2005 international symposium on Low power electronics and design, August 08-10, 2005, San Diego, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/1077603.1077668]
• 3: Open Source Development Lab, Database Test 2, www.osdl.org/lab_activities/kernel_testing/osdl_database_test_suite/osdl_dbt-2/, February 2006.
• 4: K. Rajamani , C. Lefurgy, On evaluating request-distribution schemes for saving energy in server clusters, Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software, p.111-122, March 06-08, 2003
• 5: J. Lau , S. Schoemackers , B. Calder, Structures for phase classification, Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software, p.57-67, March 10-12, 2004
• 6: Xizhou Feng , Rong Ge , Kirk W. Cameron, Power and Energy Profiling of Scientific Applications on Distributed Systems, Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'05) - Papers, p.34, April 04-08, 2005 [doi>10.1109/IPDPS.2005.346]
• 7: Aqeel Mahesri and Vibhore Vardhan, Power Consumption Breakdown on a Modern Laptop, Workshop on Power Aware Computing Systems, 37th International Symposium on Microarchitecture, December 2004.
• 8: Canturk Isci and Margaret Martonosi, Phase Characterization for Power: Evaluating Control-Flow-Based and Event-Counter-Based Techniques. 12th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, pp 122--133, February 2006.
• 9: Ashutosh S. Dhodapkar , James E. Smith, Comparing Program Phase Detection Techniques, Proceedings of the 36th annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, p.217, December 03-05, 2003
• 10: Pat Bohrer, Elmootazbellah N. Elnozahy, Tom Keller, Michael Kistler, Charles Lefurgy, Chandler McDowell, and Ram Rajamony, The Case For Power Management in Web Servers. IBM Research, Austin TX 78758, USA.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS

General Terms:
Experimentation, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
chipset, commercial workload characterization, disk, memory, microprocessor, power, program phase