Quantifying Energy Usage in Data Centers through Instruction-count Overhead

K. F. D. Rietveld, H. A. G. Wijshoff

2013

Abstract

Energy usage of data centers is rising quickly and the electricity cost can no longer be neglected. Most efforts to relieve the increase of energy usage concentrate on improving hardware efficiency, by improving the hardware itself or by turning to server virtualization. Yet, no serious effort is made to reduce electricity usage by targeting the software running in data centers. To be able to effectively target software, a quantification of software overhead is necessary. In this paper, we present a quantification of the sources of overhead in applications that are these days ubiquitous in data centers: web applications. Experiments with three web applications show that up to 90% of the instructions executed to generate web pages are non-essential, in other words overhead, and can be eliminated. Elimination of these non-essential instructions results in an approximately linear decrease in page generation time as well as significantly reduced energy usage. In order to get the rising energy cost of data centers under control it is obligatory to be able to quantify the source of energy cost. In this paper we present an approach how to quantify wasted energy based on a quantification of non-essential instructions that are executed.

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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

F. D. Rietveld K. and A. G. Wijshoff H. (2013). Quantifying Energy Usage in Data Centers through Instruction-count Overhead . In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Smart Grids and Green IT Systems - Volume 1: SMARTGREENS, ISBN 978-989-8565-55-6, pages 189-198. DOI: 10.5220/0004357901890198


in Bibtex Style

@conference{smartgreens13,
author={K. F. D. Rietveld and H. A. G. Wijshoff},
title={Quantifying Energy Usage in Data Centers through Instruction-count Overhead},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Smart Grids and Green IT Systems - Volume 1: SMARTGREENS,},
year={2013},
pages={189-198},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004357901890198},
isbn={978-989-8565-55-6},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Smart Grids and Green IT Systems - Volume 1: SMARTGREENS,
TI - Quantifying Energy Usage in Data Centers through Instruction-count Overhead
SN - 978-989-8565-55-6
AU - F. D. Rietveld K.
AU - A. G. Wijshoff H.
PY - 2013
SP - 189
EP - 198
DO - 10.5220/0004357901890198