Analysis of the Scope of Dynamic Power Management in Emerging Server Architectures

The architectures of large-scale Internet servers are becoming more complex each year in order to store and process a large amount of Internet data (Big Data) as efficiently as possible. One of the consequences of this continually growing complexity is that individual servers consume a significant amount of data even when they are idle. In this paper we experimentally investigate the scope and usefulness of existing and proposed dynamic power management strategies to manage power at core, socket, and server levels. Our experiment involves four dynamic voltage and frequency scaling policies, three different workloads having different resource consumption statistics, and the activation and deactivation of different sockets (packets) of a multicore, multi-socket server. Moreover, we establish a quantitative relationships between the workload (w) and the estimated power consumption (p) under different power management strategies to make a quantitative comparison of the different strategies and server configurations.