Queuing theoretic analysis of power-performance tradeoff in power-efficient computing

In this paper we study the power-performance relationship of power-efficient computing from a queuing theoretic perspective. We investigate the interplay of several system operations including processing speed, system on/off decisions, and server farm size. We identify that there are oftentimes 'sweet spots' in power-efficient operations: there exist optimal combinations of processing speed and system settings that maximize power efficiency. For the single server case, a widely deployed threshold mechanism is studied. We show that there exist optimal processing speed and threshold value pairs that minimize the power consumption. This holds for the threshold mechanism with job batching. For the multi-server case, it is shown that there exist best processing speed and server farm size combinations.