E2CC: Building energy efficient ClassCloud using DRBL

Green computing is a growing research topic. Its goal is to increase energy efficiency and reduced resource consumption. Building infrastructure for cloud computing is one of the methods to achieve these goals. The key concept of cloud computing is to provide a resource sharing model based on virtualization, distributed filesystem and Web services. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient architecture for cloud computing using Diskless Remote Boot in Linux (DRBL) and Xen. We call this architecture ClassCloud because it is suitable to build an experimental cloud infrastructure in PC classrooms. According to our power consumption experiments, the diskless design of DRBL provides a way to implement a power economization computing platform. Computers booting from network without hard disk installed will reduce power consumption from 7% to 33% compared to computers with hard disk installed.