Resource Tuning for Energy Efficient Slicing

This paper explores and validates resource tuning techniques in multi-core processors that maximise performance while realising energy efficiency of network slices. We demonstrate how Speed Select Technology Base Frequency (SST-BF) increases network throughput for telecoms workloads by 26% using high frequency cores versus lower frequency cores. A 15% increase is observed over the case where SST-BF is disabled, while yielding a corresponding increase in power of just 5% within the same overall Thermal Design Power (TDP). We explain how SST-BF can be used in conjunction with Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) and Memory Bandwidth Allocation (MBA) to deliver coordinated performance tuning with an observed overall improvement of 34%, while preempting and eliminating Noisy Neighbour interference between multi-tenanted workloads on the same x86 server. We also demonstrate how to link the locally applied resource slicing techniques available on the multi-core processor platform, to the diverse needs of end-to-end “energy-efficient” network slices.