Power provisioning for a warehouse-sized computer

Large-scale Internet services require a computing infrastructure that can be appropriately described as a warehouse-sized computing system. The cost of building datacenter facilities capable of delivering a given power capacity to such a computer can rival the recurring energy consumption costs themselves. Therefore, there are strong economic incentives to operate facilities as close as possible to maximum capacity, so that the non-recurring facility costs can be best amortized. That is difficult to achieve in practice because of uncertainties in equipment power ratings and because power consumption tends to vary significantly with the actual computing activity. Effective power provisioning strategies are needed to determine how much computing equipment can be safely and efficiently hosted within a given power budget. In this paper we present the aggregate power usage characteristics of large collections of servers (up to 15 thousand) for different classes of applications over a pe...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Xiaobo Fan, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, Luiz André Barroso
• Keywords: Hardware, ISCA 2007, Power Budget, Power Capacity, Power Usage