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PowerNap plan could save 75 percent of data center energy
March 06, 2009ANN ARBOR, Mich.-Putting idle servers to sleep when they're not in use is part of University of Michigan researchers' plan to save up to 75 percent of the energy that power-hungry computer data centers consume.
Data centers, central to the nation's cyberinfrastructure, house computing, networking and storage equipment. Each time you make an ATM withdrawal, search the Internet or make a cell phone call, your request is routed through a data center.
Thomas Wenisch, assistant professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and students David Meisner and Brian Gold will present a paper about improving the energy efficiency of data center computer systems on March 10 at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems in Washington, D.C.
Wenisch and the students analyzed data center workloads and power consumption and used mathematical modeling to develop their approach.
The approach includes PowerNap, the plan to put idle servers to sleep, and RAILS, a more efficient power supplying technique. (RAILS stands for Redundant Array for Inexpensive Load Sharing.)
The Environmental Protection Agency expects the energy consumption of the nation's data centers to exceed 100 billion kWh by 2011, for an annual electricity cost of $7.4 billion. Those figures are about twice what they were in 2006, when data centers already drew more electricity than 5.8 million U.S. households.
Data centers waste most of the energy they draw. The facilities are inefficient because they must be ready for peak processing demands much higher than the average demand.
"For the typical industrial data center, the average utilization is 20 to 30 percent. The computers are spending about four-fifths of their time doing nothing," Wenisch said. "And the way we build these computers today, they're still using 60 percent of peak power even when they're doing nothing."
Techniques employed today such as dynamic frequency and voltage scaling don't do enough to conserve power, the researchers say. Instead, servers could sleep periodically like ordinary laptops.
They would have to slumber and wake exceedingly fast, Wenisch says. His detailed analysis of 600 servers illustrates the sporadic and sparse demands on data center servers. Their average idle period is mere hundreds of milliseconds. Their average busy period is even shorter, at tens of milliseconds. A millisecond is one-thousandth of a second.
While PowerNap would require a new operating system to coordinate the instantaneous sleeping and waking, most of the other technologies that would make this possible already exist, Wenisch says.
"There aren't really technological barriers to achieving this," Wenisch said. "The individual components know how to go to sleep fast. Engineers have developed that technology for laptops and smart phones. But the pieces haven't been used in servers where you don't have a user closing the lid. The components are out there, but the system needs to be redesigned."
While the computer parts might not be hard to find, the power supply would need to be overhauled for PowerNap to work properly, the researchers say. Their new RAILS technique addresses this problem.
Today's power supply technique for stacking "blade-based" servers connects about 16 computers to a handful of 2,250-watt power supplies. The arrangement is inefficient unless the machines are running full steam.
To cut down on the power loss, RAILS would replace the one 2,250-watt power supply with a bunch of smaller, 500-watt power supplies. RAILS would be a necessary complement to PowerNap because without it, even sleeping servers would waste energy.
"Together, these approaches can help make data centers green and solve these big energy efficiency challenges," Wenisch said.
This research is funded by the National Science Foundation and Intel. The paper is called "PowerNap: Eliminating Server Idle Power." David Meisner, first author of the paper, is a doctoral student in the U-M division of Computer Science and Engineering. Brian Gold, a co-author of the paper, is a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
U-M has filed for patent protection on the technology, and is currently seeking an industry partner to help bring the technology to market.
Simple data center and server initiatives underway at the University of Michigan are reducing computing energy levels by 10 percent, which equals $500,000 annually, says Tim Slottow, U-M executive vice president and chief financial officer.
"Green computing is a wide-open environmental frontier and through Climate Savers Computing Initiative, the University is implementing data center and server green computing best practices. More sophisticated solutions such as PowerNap and RAILS could exponentially increase our energy savings," Slottow said.
University of Michigan
Wenisch and the students analyzed data center workloads and power consumption and used mathematical modeling to develop their approach.
The approach includes PowerNap, the plan to put idle servers to sleep, and RAILS, a more efficient power supplying technique. (RAILS stands for Redundant Array for Inexpensive Load Sharing.)
The Environmental Protection Agency expects the energy consumption of the nation's data centers to exceed 100 billion kWh by 2011, for an annual electricity cost of $7.4 billion. Those figures are about twice what they were in 2006, when data centers already drew more electricity than 5.8 million U.S. households.
Data centers waste most of the energy they draw. The facilities are inefficient because they must be ready for peak processing demands much higher than the average demand.
"For the typical industrial data center, the average utilization is 20 to 30 percent. The computers are spending about four-fifths of their time doing nothing," Wenisch said. "And the way we build these computers today, they're still using 60 percent of peak power even when they're doing nothing."
Techniques employed today such as dynamic frequency and voltage scaling don't do enough to conserve power, the researchers say. Instead, servers could sleep periodically like ordinary laptops.
They would have to slumber and wake exceedingly fast, Wenisch says. His detailed analysis of 600 servers illustrates the sporadic and sparse demands on data center servers. Their average idle period is mere hundreds of milliseconds. Their average busy period is even shorter, at tens of milliseconds. A millisecond is one-thousandth of a second.
While PowerNap would require a new operating system to coordinate the instantaneous sleeping and waking, most of the other technologies that would make this possible already exist, Wenisch says.
"There aren't really technological barriers to achieving this," Wenisch said. "The individual components know how to go to sleep fast. Engineers have developed that technology for laptops and smart phones. But the pieces haven't been used in servers where you don't have a user closing the lid. The components are out there, but the system needs to be redesigned."
While the computer parts might not be hard to find, the power supply would need to be overhauled for PowerNap to work properly, the researchers say. Their new RAILS technique addresses this problem.
Today's power supply technique for stacking "blade-based" servers connects about 16 computers to a handful of 2,250-watt power supplies. The arrangement is inefficient unless the machines are running full steam.
To cut down on the power loss, RAILS would replace the one 2,250-watt power supply with a bunch of smaller, 500-watt power supplies. RAILS would be a necessary complement to PowerNap because without it, even sleeping servers would waste energy.
"Together, these approaches can help make data centers green and solve these big energy efficiency challenges," Wenisch said.
This research is funded by the National Science Foundation and Intel. The paper is called "PowerNap: Eliminating Server Idle Power." David Meisner, first author of the paper, is a doctoral student in the U-M division of Computer Science and Engineering. Brian Gold, a co-author of the paper, is a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
U-M has filed for patent protection on the technology, and is currently seeking an industry partner to help bring the technology to market.
Simple data center and server initiatives underway at the University of Michigan are reducing computing energy levels by 10 percent, which equals $500,000 annually, says Tim Slottow, U-M executive vice president and chief financial officer.
"Green computing is a wide-open environmental frontier and through Climate Savers Computing Initiative, the University is implementing data center and server green computing best practices. More sophisticated solutions such as PowerNap and RAILS could exponentially increase our energy savings," Slottow said.
University of Michigan
Data Center Current Events and Data Center News RSSArctic sea ice recovers slightly in 2009, remains on downward trend, says U. of Colorado report
Despite a slight recovery in summer Arctic sea ice in 2009 from record-setting low years in 2007 and 2008, the sea ice extent remains significantly below previous years and remains on a trend leading toward ice-free Arctic summers, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Arctic Sea ice extent is third lowest on record
U.S. satellite measurements show Arctic sea ice extent in 2009 - the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by floating ice - was the third lowest since satellite measurements were first made in 1979.
Arctic sea ice reaches minimum extent for 2009, third lowest ever recorded
The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the third-lowest recorded since satellites began measuring sea ice extent in 1979, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Satellites and submarines give the skinny on sea ice thickness
This summer, a group of scientists and students - as well as a Canadian senator, a writer, and a filmmaker - set out from Resolute Bay, Canada, on the icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent.
Scientists link genetic glitches to common childhood cancer
A multicenter team of childhood cancer researchers has discovered two genetic variations linked to an increased risk for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL, the most common childhood cancer in the United States.
Computer scientists scale 'layer 2' data center networks to 100,000 ports and beyond
University of California, San Diego computer scientists have created software that they hope will lead to data centers that logically function as single, plug-and-play networks that will scale to the massive scale of modern data center networks.
Genetic finding could lead to targeted therapy for neuroblastoma
Researchers have identified a genetic glitch that could lead to development of neuroblastoma, a deadly form of cancer that typically strikes children under 2.
Dry autumns and winters may lead to fewer tornadoes in the spring, says UGA researcher
Global warming will likely mean more unpredictable weather, scientists say, and a new study by researchers at the University of Georgia pins down, possibly for the first time, how drought conditions in an area's fall and winter may effect tornado activity the following spring.
Are we cherry picking participants for studies of antidepressants?
Findings from clinical studies used to gain Food and Drug Administration approval of common antidepressants are not applicable to most patients with depression, according to a report led by the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.
New Arctic satellite data shows Arctic literally on thin ice
The latest data from NASA and the University of Colorado at Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center show the continuation of a decade-long trend of shrinking sea ice extent in the Arctic, including new evidence for thinning ice as well.
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