GAMES: Green Active Management of Energy in IT Service Centres

Abstract

AbstractThe vision of the recently started GAMES European Research project is a new generation of energy efficient IT Service Centres, designed taking into account both the characteristics of the applications running in the centre and context-aware adaptivity features that can be enabled both at the application level and within the IT and utility infrastructure. Adaptivity at the application level is based on the service-oriented paradigm, which allows a dynamic composition and recomposition of services to guarantee Quality of Service levels that have been established with the users. At the infrastructure level, adaptivity is being sought with the capacity of switching on and off dynamically the systems components, based on the state of the service centre. However, these two perspectives are usually considered separately, managing at different levels applications and infrastructure. In addition, while performance and cost are usually the main parameters being considered both during design and at run time, energy efficiency of the service centre is normally not an issue. However, given that the impact of service centres is becoming more and more important in the global energy consumption, and that energy resources, in particular in peak periods, are more and more constrained, an efficient use of energy in service centres has become an important goal. In the GAMES project, energy efficiency improvement goals are tackled based on exploiting adaptivity, on building a knowledge base for evaluating the impact of the applications on the service centre energy consumption, and exploiting the application characteristics for an improved use of resources.KeywordsVirtual MachineBusiness ProcessService CentreService CompositionService Level AgreementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.