14 DAY TRIAL // Up until recently, attempts to diminish the amount of power used by data centers came at a cost: performance levels sometimes also found themselves somewhat lowered.
However, researchers employed by Microsoft seem to have developed a tool that allows for maximizing energy efficiency and, in the same time, minimizing – if not altogether completely annihilating – any performance downfalls.
Microsoft's team, whose members were Aman Kansal, Sriram Govindan and Sriram Sankar, presented its findings at the International Green Computing Conference that took place this week in San Jose, California.
According to businessgreen.com, most of the power management tools presently used to make modern servers more environmentally friendly reduce power consumption by altering the processor's operating frequency.
Naturally, this leads to occasional failures as far as the overall efficiency of the system is concerned.
Both in order to limit the power typically consumed by servers, and to reduce the risk of overloading the existing power supplies, Microsoft's researchers tested out several power capping systems.
The main idea was to find a way to optimize the data center's power supplies or diesel generators for actual peak power loads, rather than for peak power loads anticipated by the server's nameplate power ratings.
Thus, it seems that the typical server power consumption never quite lives up to the manufacturer's expectations and to the value inscribed on the nameplate.
The control tool they eventually developed allows them to limit the number of requests made on each of the servers and, as the scientists themselves explain, “this implicitly reduces the power consumption since the processor has more idle cycles that it can spend in lower power sleep states.”
Preliminary tests indicate that, used together with previous power management tools, this technology allows for establishing a more than convenient balance between the amount of power used by the data-center and the overall levels of performance.
However, further studies are needed before this technology is made available to the general public.