SONAR Systems Research Group

Power Research

Datacenter servers are often under-provisioned for peak power consumption due to the substantial cost of providing power. When there is insufficient power for the workload, servers can lower voltage and frequency levels to reduce consumption, but at the cost of performance. Current processors provide power limiting mechanisms, but they generally apply uniformly to all CPUs on a chip.

Support

This work is supported by NSF grants CSR: Small: Advancing Operating System Interfaces to Solid-State Storage (CNS-1218485) and CSR-DMSS, SM: Operating System Abstractions for Modern Hardware (CNS-0834473) and gifts from Google.

Per-application Power Delivery

We propose and evaluate priority-based and share-based policies to deliver differential power to applications executing on a single socket in a server. For share-based policies, we design and evaluate policies using shares of power, shares of frequency, and shares of performance. These variations have different hardware and software requirements, and different results. Our results show that power shares have the worst performance isolation, and that frequency shares are both simpler and generally perform better than performance shares.



Power Publications

Code and Data

We will post our code and underlying data here.