EDR: An energy-aware runtime load distribution system for data-intensive applications in the cloud

Data centers account for a growing percentage of US power consumption. Energy efficiency is now a first-class design constraint for the data centers that support cloud services. Service providers must distribute their data efficiently across multiple data centers. This includes creation of data replicas that provide multiple copies of data for efficient access. However, selecting replicas to maximize performance while minimizing energy waste is an open problem. State of the art replica selection approaches either do not address energy, lack scalability and/or are vulnerable to crashes due to use of a centralized coordinator. Therefore, we propose, develop and evaluate a simple cost-oriented decentralized replica selection system named EDR (Energy-Aware Distributed Running system), implemented with two distributed optimization algorithms. We demonstrate experimentally the cost differences in various replica selection scenarios and show that our novel approach is as fast as the best available decentralized approach DONAR, while additionally considering dynamic energy costs. We show that an average of 12% savings on total system energy costs can be achieved by using EDR for several data intensive applications.