Fast Storage Devices Research Articles

TeraHeap: Exploiting Flash Storage for Mitigating DRAM Pressure in Managed Big Data Frameworks

Big data analytics frameworks, such as Spark and Giraph, need to process and cache massive datasets that do not always fit on the managed heap. Therefore, frameworks temporarily move long-lived objects outside the heap (off-heap) on a fast storage device. However, this practice results in (1) high serialization/deserialization (S/D) cost and (2) high memory pressure when off-heap objects are moved back for processing. In this article, we propose TeraHeap , a system that eliminates S/D overhead and expensive GC scans for a large portion of objects in analytics frameworks. TeraHeap relies on three concepts: (1) It eliminates S/D by extending the managed runtime (JVM) to use a second high-capacity heap (H2) over a fast storage device. (2) It offers a simple hint-based interface, allowing analytics frameworks to leverage object knowledge to populate H2. (3) It reduces GC cost by fencing the collector from scanning H2 objects while maintaining the illusion of a single managed heap, ensuring memory safety. We implement TeraHeap in OpenJDK8 and OpenJDK17 and evaluate it with fifteen widely used applications in two real-world big data frameworks, Spark and Giraph. We find that for the same DRAM size, TeraHeap improves performance by up to 73% and 28% compared to native Spark and Giraph. Also, it can still provide better performance by consuming up to \(4.6\times\) and \(1.2\times\) less DRAM than native Spark and Giraph, respectively. TeraHeap can also be used for in-memory frameworks and applying it to the Neo4j Graph Data Science library improves its performance by up to 26%. Finally, it outperforms Panthera, a state-of-the-art garbage collector for hybrid DRAM-NVM memories, by up to 69%.

Electrodeposited Co0.85Se/Ni3Se2 heterostructure as an efficient binder-free cathode for fast electrochemical energy storage devices

In this study, a facile technique was developed to generate a bimetallic Co0.85Se/Ni3Se2 heterostructure through a straightforward one-step electrodeposition process. The resulting structure proved to be an efficient cathode for fast charge/discharge electrochemical energy storage devices. The composition and morphology of the cathode can be easily adjusted by varying the molar ratio of Co/Ni precursors. The optimized Co0.85Se/Ni3Se2 (3:1) electrode demonstrated an impressive specific capacity of 141.9 mAh g−1 at a current density of 1 A g−1. It retained a capacity of 103.5 mAh g−1 at a high current density of 8 A g−1 due to its heterostructure nature. The assembled hybrid supercapacitor (HSC) device based on this optimized cathode achieved remarkable energy and power densities. Additionally, the Co0.85Se/Ni3Se2 (3:1) electrode was successfully demonstrated in micro-HSC (μ-HSC) applications, exhibiting favorable cycling stability during 480-h floating tests. These findings suggest that the synthesized Co0.85Se/Ni3Se2 cathode has great potential for use in high-performance electrochemical energy storage devices.

SplinterDB and Maplets: Improving the Tradeoffs in Key-Value Store Compaction Policy

A critical aspect of modern key-value stores is the interaction between compaction policy and filters. Aggressive compaction reduces the on-disk footprint of a key-value store and can improve query performance, but can reduce insertion throughput because it is I/O and CPU expensive. Filters can mitigate the query costs of lazy compaction, but only if they fit in RAM, limiting the scalability of queries with lazy compaction. And, with fast storage devices, the CPU costs of querying filters in a lazy compacting system can be significant. In this work, we present Mapped SplinterDB, a key-value store that achieves excellent insertion performance, query performance, space efficiency, and scalability by replacing filters with maplets, space-efficient data structures that act as lossy maps with false positives. Critically, we use quotient maplets, which can be merged and resized without access to the underlying data, enabling us to decouple compaction of the data from compaction of the quotient maplets. Thus Mapped SplinterDB can compact data lazily and quotient maplets aggressively, so that each level has multiple sorted runs of data but only one quotient maplet. Quotient maplets are so small that compacting them aggressively is still cheaper than compacting the (much larger) data lazily, so overall we get the insertion performance of a lazily compacted system. And, since there is only one quotient maplet to query on each level, we get the query performance of an aggressively compacted system. Furthermore, quotient maplets can accelerate queries even when they don't fit in RAM, improving scalability to huge datasets. We also show how to use quotient maplets to estimate when a compaction could resolve a high density of updates, enabling Mapped SplinterDB to perform targeted compactions for space recovery. In our benchmarks, Mapped SplinterDB matches the insertion performance of SplinterDB, a state-of-the-art lazily compacted system, and beats RocksDB, an aggressive compacting system, by up to 9×. On queries, Mapped SplinterDB outperforms SplinterDB and RocksDB by up to 89% and 83%, respectively, and scales gracefully to huge datasets. Mapped SplinterDB is able to dynamically trade update performance for space efficiency, resulting in space overheads on update-heavy workloads as low as 15-61%, whereas RocksDB had 80-117% and SplinterDB had up to 137% space overhead.

Virtual-Memory Assisted Buffer Management

Most database management systems cache pages from storage in a main memory buffer pool. To do this, they either rely on a hash table that translates page identifiers into pointers, or on pointer swizzling which avoids this translation. In this work, we propose vmcache, a buffer manager design that instead uses hardware-supported virtual memory to translate page identifiers to virtual memory addresses. In contrast to existing mmap-based approaches, the DBMS retains control over page faulting and eviction. Our design is portable across modern operating systems, supports arbitrary graph data, enables variable-sized pages, and is easy to implement. One downside of relying on virtual memory is that with fast storage devices the existing operating system primitives for manipulating the page table can become a performance bottleneck. As a second contribution, we therefore propose exmap, which implements scalable page table manipulation on Linux. Together, vmcache and exmap provide flexible, efficient, and scalable buffer management on multi-core CPUs and fast storage devices.

Flexible and free-supporting Prussian blue analogs /MXene film for high-performance sodium-ion batteries

Sodium-ion batteries are the most promising alternative to lithium-ion batteries because of their low cost and environmental friendliness. Prussian blue analogs (PBAs) have attracted the attention of researchers because of their open skeleton structure and abundant redox active sites. However, the interstitial water in its crystal structure and poor electron conductivity limit its performance in sodium-ion batteries. A flexible self-supporting electrode is prepared by anhydrous preparation in a ball mill and simple filtration method. The high surface area nanoparticles and the high flexibility MXene layer in the electrode adapt to the rapid Na+ dynamics, alleviating the electrode expansion. The formation of a NaF-rich cathode-electrolyte interface (CEI) layer on the electrode surface inhibits the erosion of active substances by electrolyte, reduces the capacity attenuation of the electrode, and enhances the cyclic stability of the electrode. Electrode without a conductive agent and binder shows excellent electrochemical performance. The discharge capacity of the electrode is 58.3 mAh g−1at 1000 mA g−1 current density, and the capacity retention rate is 59.7% after 1000 cycles. This work has implications for the design of the next generation of low-cost, flexible, and fast charge and discharge energy storage devices.

RabbitFX: Efficient Framework for FASTA/Q File Parsing on Modern Multi-Core Platforms.

The continuous growth of generated sequencing data leads to the development of a variety of associated bioinformatics tools. However, many of them are not able to fully exploit the resources of modern multi-core systems since they are bottlenecked by parsing files leading to slow execution times. This motivates the design of an efficient method for parsing sequencing data that can exploit the power of modern hardware, especially for modern CPUs with fast storage devices. We have developed RabbitFX, a fast, efficient, and easy-to-use framework for processing biological sequencing data on modern multi-core platforms. It can efficiently read FASTA and FASTQ files by combining a lightweight parsing method by means of an optimized formatting implementation. Furthermore, we provide user-friendly and modularized C++ APIs that can be easily integrated into applications in order to increase their file parsing speed. As proof-of-concept, we have integrated RabbitFX into three I/O-intensive applications: fastp, Ktrim, and Mash. Our evaluation shows that the inclusion of RabbitFX leads to speedups of at least 11.6 (6.6), 2.4 (2.4), and 3.7 (3.2) compared to the original versions on plain (gzip-compressed) files, respectively. These case studies demonstrate that RabbitFX can be easily integrated into a variety of NGS analysis tools to significantly reduce associated runtimes. It is open source software available at https://github.com/RabbitBio/RabbitFX.

One-Dimensional π-d Conjugated Conductive Metal-Organic Framework with Dual Redox-Active Sites for High-Capacity and Durable Cathodes for Aqueous Zinc Batteries.

Aqueous Zn-based batteries (ZIBs) possess huge advantages in terms of high safety, low cost, and environmental friendliness. However, the lack of suitable cathodes with high-capacity, long-cycling, and high-rate capability limits their practical application. Herein, we present a highly crystalline one-dimensional π-d conjugated conductive metal-organic framework by coordinating ultrasmall 1,2,4,5-benzenetetramine (BTA) linkers with copper ions (Cu-BTA-H), as a cathode for ZIBs. The large ratio of active sites and dual redox mechanism of Cu-BTA-H, including the one-electron-redox reaction over copper ions (via Cu2+/Cu+) and the two-electron-redox reaction over organic ligands (via C═N/C-N), effectively enhance its reversible capacity. Meanwhile, the abundant porosity, small band gap, high crystallinity, and stable coordination structure of Cu-BTA-H endow it with fast ion/electron transport and effectively hinder the dissolution of organic ligands during cycling, respectively. Consequently, Cu-BTA-H possesses a high reversible capacity of 330 mAh g-1 at 200 mA g-1 and excellent rate performance and long-cycle stability, with a high capacity of 106.1 mAh g-1 at 2.0 A g-1 after 500 cycles and a high Coulombic efficiency of ∼100%. The proposed conductive MOFs with dual redox-active sites provide an efficient approach for constructing fast, stable, and high-capacity energy storage devices.

Strain induced electromagnetic coupling in tri-phase multiferroic composites 0.8[(1-x)Fe2O3–xPbZrO3]+0.2Cr2O3 for multistate devices

Multiferroic composites are highly desirable for next-generation multifunctional smart devices because of their low power consumption, fast data processing, and nonvolatile nature in memory devices. Here we synthesized a series of tri-phase composite of Fe2O3, PbZrO3, and Cr2O3 with general formula 0.8[(1-x)Fe2O3–xPbZrO3]+0.2Cr2O3 (x = 0.0, 0.33, 0.66 and 1.0) via a chemical approach. Individual oxides are synthesized by the sol-gel auto-combustion method and the solid-state route is used to mix them. Through structural analysis, the formation of tri-phase composites is confirmed by the presence of peaks belonging to each phase. The morphological study suggested that the composites have a homogeneous distribution of grain size over the surface with small voids. To investigate the ferroelectric nature of these composites the saturation polarization, remanent polarization, and coercivity are calculated from their P-E loops. Using these values, the switching charge density and recoverable energy density are evaluated which highlighted the importance of these composites for fast switching and energy storage devices. The response of variation in polarization by the magnetic field is mapped by magneto-electric coupling measurement. Our results show that these tri-phase composites with ferroelectric and magnetoelectric response are potential candidates for high-density data storage and ME multifunctional devices.

Tailoring Photoinduced Nonequilibrium Magnetizations in In2Se3 Bilayers

AbstractMagnetization generation and accumulation in intrinsically nonmagnetic materials is one of the key routes to various exotic applications, especially realizing fast information storage and memory devices. Among the various approaches for magnetization injection, light irradiation is advantageous for its noncontacting and non‐invasive nature, and has been receiving great attention during the past few decades. In the current work, a quadratic response theory and first‐principles calculations are applied to reveal photoinduced magnetization in recently discovered 2D In2Se3 bilayers. The ferroelectric In2Se3 bilayers can be (meta‐) stabilized in versatile stacking patterns, exhibiting largely tunable electronic band structure, and optical feature. Hence, it is suggested that under circularly polarized light illumination, the system can show different photoinduced magnetization responses with large contrast in different stacking patterns. The magnetizations are composed by both spin and orbital angular momentum contributions, which can reach as large as 1μB under a laser with intermediate intensity (≈109 W cm–2). This magnitude can be easily observed and furthermore manipulated in the state‐of‐the‐art experimental techniques. The proposal suggests a candidate material platform to explore the interplay among spintronics, orbitronics, nonlinear optics, and ferroelectrics in a single platform.

Shape anisotropy effect on magnetization reversal induced by linear down chirp pulse

We investigate the shape anisotropy effect on the magnetization reversal of a nanoparticle driven by a down-chirp microwave field pulse (DCMP). Based on the Landau–Lifshitz–Gilbert equation, numerical results reveal that the microwave amplitude, initial frequency, and chirp rate of DCMP decrease with the increase of shape anisotropy. For a certain shape of the nanoparticle, the reversal time is significantly reduced. These findings can be attributed as the shape anisotropy opposes the magnetocrystalline anisotropy, and thus the energy barrier decreases. The result of damping dependence of reversal indicates that there exists an optimal damping situation at which magnetization is fastest. Moreover, the required microwave field amplitude can be lowered by applying the spin-polarized current simultaneously. The usage of an optimum combination of DCMP and current is suggested to achieve cost-effective and faster switching. So these findings might be useful to realize the fast and power-efficient data storage device.

A fast self-charging and temperature adaptive electrochromic energy storage device

ECESDs exhibit a wide operating temperature range. They can be chemically self-charged through a spontaneous redox reaction and the energy status could be estimated by the naked eye according to the obvious color during the charge/discharge process.

NVMM-Oriented Hierarchical Persistent Client Caching for Lustre

In high-performance computing (HPC), data and metadata are stored on special server nodes and client applications access the servers’ data and metadata through a network, which induces network latencies and resource contention. These server nodes are typically equipped with (slow) magnetic disks, while the client nodes store temporary data on fast SSDs or even on non-volatile main memory (NVMM). Therefore, the full potential of parallel file systems can only be reached if fast client side storage devices are included into the overall storage architecture. In this article, we propose an NVMM-based hierarchical persistent client cache for the Lustre file system (NVMM-LPCC for short). NVMM-LPCC implements two caching modes: a read and write mode (RW-NVMM-LPCC for short) and a read only mode (RO-NVMM-LPCC for short). NVMM-LPCC integrates with the Lustre Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) solution and the Lustre layout lock mechanism to provide consistent persistent caching services for I/O applications running on client nodes, meanwhile maintaining a global unified namespace of the entire Lustre file system. The evaluation results presented in this article show that NVMM-LPCC can increase the average read throughput by up to 35.80 times and the average write throughput by up to 9.83 times compared with the native Lustre system, while providing excellent scalability.

Stochastic Procurement of Fast Reserve Services in Renewable Integrated Power Systems

Ensuring the security and quality of supply in a power system after a contingency event is one of the most challenging tasks for an electricity system operator. This work is initiated by this challenge and proposes a solution based on the use of provided reserves by fast generators, storage devices, and wind farms. A coordinated model is proposed in a joint energy and reserves market considering their corresponding cost to ensure the adequacy in the simultaneous deployment of reserves for the different sources of uncertainties. The Benders decomposition approach is used in the modeling of the stochastic security-constrained unit commitment, and considering the large-scale and complex nature of the model, acceleration techniques are suggested to reduce the execution time. The proposed model is tested on the 6-bus and the IEEE 118-bus test systems. Numerical results show that the optimal values of reserves successfully address contingencies in both of the critical and normal periods after the contingencies and the optimal solution is calculated in a reasonable computing time.

(Invited) Cation-Disordered Li3VO4-Based Materials As a Pseudocapacitive Negative Electrode

The growing demand for fast charge-discharge electrical energy storage (EES) devices with long cycles lifetimes has led to the need for alternatives to current battery systems, which store energy via slow faradic reactions. Among different EES technologies, electric double layer capacitors (EDLCs) are considered as promising devices due to their high-power, safe and long-lived characteristics. One of the approaches to further enhance the cell voltage and energy density of EDLCs while maintaining their high power is to replace the activated carbon with ultrafast lithium ion battery materials as hybrid supercapacitors.The orthorhombic β-Li3VO4 (β-LVO) has been identified as a promising negative electrode material for hybrid supercapacitors, with theoretical specific capacity of 394 mAh g-1 (2 lithium accommodation)[1]. The electron-donor effect of Li, exactly opposite to the inductive effect of polyanions, lowers the redox potentials of V5+/V4+ and V4+/V3+ to a safe but still low potential range between 1.3 and 0.4 V vs. Li/Li+, compared to the 3.0 V usually observed for V2O5. Recent our studies [1-2] unveiled that both the structure and electrochemical signature change of the β-LVO during the initial cycling, resulting in what we termed as electrochemical activation process. This electrochemical activation process induces the transformation of β-LVO from the pristine cation-ordered structure into an activated LVO, which has a Li+/V5+ cation-disordered structure. Charge discharge curves also change from “battery-like” plateau to “pseudocapacitive” slope via such cation-disordering of LVO, along with its reaction mechanism change from two-phase to solid-solution reaction[2]. Li+ diffusion coefficient (DLi ) evaluation by galvanostatic intermittent titration technique (GITT) reveals that the DLi of cation-disordered LVO is two orders of magnitude higher than the one of pristine β-LVO. Yet, the preparation method of cation-disordered LVO has been a major issue as the electrochemical activation process of β-LVO is impractical from the industrial point of view. Such electrochemical process requires a precycling of β-LVO for 10-20 cycles down to low potential below 0.4 V vs. Li/Li+, which is difficult to control and inevitably produces undesirable irreversible capacity for a full cell assembling.In this talk, we introduce an alternative to the electrochemical process, i.e., the direct synthesis of fully cation-disordered LVO via simple mechanical milling of the pristine β-LVO powder (Fig.1). The mechanochemical process brings about the disordering of LVO cation sublattice and thus enables to obtain thermodynamically metastable cation-disordered LVO phase without any precycling. Comparison of X-ray and neutron powder diffraction patterns confirmed the successful direct synthesis of cation-disordered LVO. The mechanochemically cation-disordered LVO shows superior rate performances to those of β-LVO and even electrochemically cation-disordered LVO. Another strategy to synthesize pseudocapacitive LVO-based material is a partial substitution of V5+ with Si4+ in β-LVO, which results in a transformation into γ-Li3+xV1-xSixO4. The γ-Li3+xV1-xSixO4 , with a partially V5+/Si4+ cation-disordered structure shows similar psuedocapacitive behavior as a fully cation-disordered LVO with enhanced DLi and rate capability compared to the β-LVO, thanks to the randomly distribution of V5+. In the presentation, we introduce those two approaches, “fully” or “partially” cation-disordering, as new paths for transformation of battery into pseudocapacitive materials with improved electrochemical performances by simple cation mixing.

Influence of pressure on piezoelectric, polarizing, and magnetic nature of SmFeO3: A DFT study

AbstractIn this article, we have presented structural, electronic, magnetic, mechanical, and optical attributes of SmFeO3 under pressure up to 80 GPa. These aforesaid properties are investigated by using state‐of‐the‐art density functional theory. The structural stability of the compound has been tested using the tolerance factor, enthalpy of formation, and elastic stability criteria of the elastic constants. Electronic band structure, the density of states, high magnetic moment, and Fermi surface analysis affirms the ferromagnetic nature of the studied compound throughout the pressure. We expect piezoelectric phenomena of the compound to be between 20 and 40 GPa pressure due to the increasing internal strain parameter with pressure. Moreover, the polarizing nature of the material is pressure‐dependent, which seems to decrease with an increase in pressure, while the minimum thermal conductivity of the compound is observed to be maximum along (110) direction, which increases with an increase in pressure. Our results suggested that the studied compound could be useful in the spintronic industry, in pressure‐dependent fast memory storage devices, and in piezoelectric sensors.

Freezing time emulating new and faster devices with virtual machines

Recent proposals of emerging data storage devices make it necessary to reevaluate all levels of the storage hierarchy to optimize the software stack performance. However, these new devices are not always widely available and therefore early experiments may be impossible. Emulators aim at mimicking as close as possible the behavior of a component, nonetheless, emulating new and fast storage devices is a challenging task due to time perception. In this work, we propose an approach to emulate storage devices using virtual machines (VMs) allowing the evaluation of a new device within a real system. We use a technique called freezing time, which pauses a VM to manipulate its clock and hide the real I/O completion time. Our approach is implemented at the hypervisor level and it is transparent to the guest operating system or application. We evaluate the technique under a real system using regular magnetic disks to emulate faster storage devices. Our method presented a latency error of 6.5% compared to a real device. Moreover, decoupled experiment between two laboratories, at the Barcelona Super Computing Center (BSC) in Spain, and the Center of Computer Science and Free Software (C3SL) in Brazil, demonstrated that our approach is reproducible and promising to allow the virtual evaluation of next-gen storage devices.

Nitrogen and Phosphorus Co-doped Porous Carbon for High-Performance Supercapacitors.

As one of the most promising fast energy storage devices, supercapacitor has been attracting intense attention for many emerging applications. However, how to enhance the electrochemical performance of electrode materials is still the main issue among various researches. In this paper, hierarchical porous carbons derived from Eleocharis dulcis has been prepared by chemical activation process with the aid of KOH at elevated temperature. Results show that the N, P co-doped porous carbon exhibits excellent electrochemical performance, it owns a specific capacitance of 340.2 F/g at 1 A/g, and obtains outstanding cycling stability of 96.9% of capacitance retention at 10 A/g after 5,000 cycles in a three-electrode system. Moreover, in the two-electrode system, the product still maintains a high specific capacitance of 227.2 F/g at 1 A/g, and achieves good electrochemical cycle stability (94.2% of capacitance retention at 10 A/g after 10,000 cycles); besides, its power/energy density are 3694.084 and 26.289 Wh/kg, respectively. Therefore, the combination of facile synthesis strategy and excellent electrochemical performance makes Eleocharis dulcis-based porous carbon as a promising electrode material for supercapacitor.

TLSM: Tiered Log-Structured Merge-Tree Utilizing Non-Volatile Memory

Log-Structured Merge-tree (LSM-tree) organizes write-friendly and hierarchical structure, which leads to inevitable disk I/O from data compaction occuring between layers. Previous research tried to reduce write bottlenecks of LSM-tree by using non-volatile memory (NVM) to LSM-tree, but write amplification on compaction does not resolved. In this paper, we present tiered LSM (TLSM), a persistent LSM-based key-value database tiering NVM, which is regarded as fast storage device. Our design aims to exploit multi-layered LSM system utilizing NVM and reduce redundant cost on compaction. We address 4 key points: (1) analysis of disk I/O overhead on current LSM-tree, (2) novel design of TLSM preserving the concept of LSM-tree and utilizing NVM, (3) persistent and byte-addressable data compaction minimizing disk write, and (4) tiering policy for increasing usability to TLSM. To implement TLSM-tree, we extended LevelDB, which is a simple LSM-based key-value store. On micro-benchmark DB Bench, the write and read latencies of TLSM are improved up to 34% and 57%, respectively, compared to those of LevelDB-NVM. In evaluation of YCSB, TLSM also reduces the write and read latencies of existing LevelDB up to 25%, 33%, respectively. Furthermore, frequency of write stall and total amount of data write are reduced significantly in TLSM.

Mapping Datasets to Object Storage System

Access libraries such as ROOT[1] and HDF5[2] allow users to interact with datasets using high level abstractions, like coordinate systems and associated slicing operations. Unfortunately, the implementations of access libraries are based on outdated assumptions about storage systems interfaces and are generally unable to fully benefit from modern fast storage devices. For example, access libraries often implement buffering and data layout that assume that large, single-threaded sequential access patterns are causing less overall latency than small parallel random access: while this is true for spinning media, it is not true for flash media. The situation is getting worse with rapidly evolving storage devices such as non-volatile memory and ever larger datasets. This project explores distributed dataset mapping infrastructures that can integrate and scale out existing access libraries using Ceph’s extensible object model, avoiding re-implementation or even modifications of these access libraries as much as possible. These programmable storage extensions coupled with our distributed dataset mapping techniques enable: 1) access library operations to be offloaded to storage system servers, 2) the independent evolution of access libraries and storage systems and 3) fully leveraging of the existing load balancing, elasticity, and failure management of distributed storage systems like Ceph. They also create more opportunities to conduct storage server-local optimizations specific to storage servers. For example, storage servers might include local key/value stores combined with chunk stores that require different optimizations than a local file system. As storage servers evolve to support new storage devices like non-volatile memory, these server-local optimizations can be implemented while minimizing disruptions to applications. We will report progress on the means by which distributed dataset mapping can be abstracted over particular access libraries, including access libraries for ROOT data, and how we address some of the challenges revolving around data partitioning and composability of access operations.

Independent Task Scheduling in Heterogeneous System

Recently, the rapid development in processing speeds, fast storage devices and better network connectivity, hasaccelerated the popularization of cloud computing. Cloud computing is an on-demand-servicewhich provides users with high end servers,storage and processing capabilities where the user need not be concerned with its infrastructure.Although, there are abundant resources in the cloud infrastructure, for the efficient working and execution of tasks, task scheduling plays a crucial role. Task scheduling results in better performance (throughput) of the system along with better resource utilization which ultimately results inreduced energy consumption. At any given time, a processor should never be in idle state, as it still consumes some amount of energy. In this paper, the use of Quantum Genetic Algorithm has led to the reduction in energy consumption. The objective is to find a scheduling sequencewhich can be implemented ina cloud computing environment. Along with minimizing energy consumption, the algorithm helps reduce makespan time of a processor as well.The results show a decrease in energy consumption by 10-15% under different test scenarios involving a variable number of tasks, processors, and the number of iterations (generations) for which the algorithm was run. The algorithm converges to the desired result within 10-15 iterations, as can be seen from the results published in this paper.