CloudSocket: Fine-Grained Power Sensing System for Datacenters

Today’s data centers have various computing and storage devices for processing a myriad of data, and they generally consume a considerable amount of electrical energy. This paper proposes a smart grid-inspired methodology to observe and profile the power consumption of a data center. Based on this technique, our paper provides information that is useful for moderating the peak power consumption of the data centers. Our power measurement platform consists of several devices named
CloudSockets
, and each CloudSocket unit can measure the power consumption of multiple computing nodes and periodically transmit measurement data wirelessly to the coordinator unit. This data can be used to analyze the relationship between the workload and the power consumption of the data center. We tested our methodology through the application of various algorithms with a 32-node distributed system that runs Apache Spark for large-scale data analytics. An analysis of our experimental results reveals how and where the peak power of each node in the grid overlaps, providing opportunities for informed coordination of the computing components for peak power reduction.