Application-Aware Power Saving for Online Transaction Processing Using Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling in a Multicore Environment

Abstract

Power consumption in data centers has been growing remarkably recent years, and power saving of their servers is essential. For power saving of these servers, power saving of an online transaction processing (OLTP) systems, which are major applications in data centers, is important. The OLTP system consumes relatively large amount of power because it is often equipped with a lot of computing and storage resources. Its power saving is difficult because it is required to meet a service level agreement (SLA), and few power saving technologies have been proposed so far. In this paper, we proposed an application-aware power saving for OLTP in a multicore environment. Our proposed methodology aims to save power consumption of OLTP systems by dynamically scaling the operating frequency of processors based on response time observation. Response time is often an important metric of SLA. Application-aware power saving enables power saving in such systems subject to SLAs. In our experimental evaluations using industrial standard benchmark TPC-C and real server workloads, 7.6% of total power consumption was saved. This reduction corresponds to 1000kJ a day in a typical entry level server.