Obtaining energy efficiency for computation intensive web services

Cloud computing refers to clusters of distributed computers that provide applications as services and on-demand resources over Internet. Theoretically, such consolidated resource enhances the energy efficiency of both clients and servers. However, this paper presents that cloud computing is a panacea for enhancing energy efficiency only under some certain conditions. The computing resources of cloud computing are located at remote machines. With current technologies, a quick way to construct cloud computing architecture is to use web pages as service interface via HTTP protocol. Pioneers in exploring cloud computing, such as Google, AmazonWeb, Microsoft Azure, Yahoo, and IBM all take this approach. Through appropriated designs, sorting, one of the most frequently used algorithms, required by a web page is able to be executed and succeed by either clients or servers. This paper constructs and validates a generalized model that suggests an energy-efficient sorting process for a web page.