PopCorns: Power Optimization Using a Cooperative Network-Server Approach for Data Centers

Data centers have become a popular computing platform for various applications, and account for nearly 2% of total US energy consumption. Therefore, it has become important to optimize data center power, and reduce their energy footprint. With newer power- efficient design in data center infrastructure and cooling equipment, active components such as servers and the network consume most of the power with emerging sets of workloads. Most existing work optimizes power in servers and networks independently, and do not address them together in a holistic fashion that can achieve greater power savings. In this paper, we present PopCorns, a cooperative server-network framework for power optimization. We propose power models for switches and servers with low-power modes. We also design job scheduling algorithms that place tasks onto servers in a power-aware manner, such that servers and network switches can take effective advantage of low-power states. Our experimental results show that we are able to achieve more than 20% higher power savings compared to a baseline strategy that performs balanced job allocation across the servers.