USENIX 2005 Annual Technical Conference, General Track Abstract
Pp. 6175 of the Proceedings
Making Scheduling "Cool": Temperature-Aware Workload Placement in Data Centers
Justin Moore and Jeff Chase, Duke University; Parthasarathy Ranganathan and Ratnesh Sharma, Hewlett-Packard Labs
Abstract
Trends towards consolidation and higher-density computing
configurations make the problem of heat management one of the critical
challenges in emerging data centers. Conventional approaches to
addressing this problem have focused at the facilities level to
develop new cooling technologies or optimize the delivery of
cooling. In contrast to these approaches, our paper explores an
alternate dimension to address this problem, namely a systems-level
solution to control the heat generation through temperature-aware
workload placement.
We first examine a theoretic thermodynamic formulation that uses
information about steady state hot spots and cold spots in the data center
and develop real-world scheduling algorithms. Based on the insights from
these results, we develop an alternate approach. Our new approach
leverages the non-intuitive observation that the source of cooling
inefficiencies can often be in locations spatially uncorrelated with its
manifested consequences; this enables additional energy savings.
Overall, our results demonstrate up to a factor of two reduction in annual
data center cooling costs over location-agnostic workload distribution,
purely through software optimizations without the need for any costly
capital investment.
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