Analysing, modelling and controlling power-performance tradeoffs in data center infrastructures

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to analyse the power-performance tradeoffs in datacenter servers, create models that capture these tradeoffs, and propose controllers to optimise the use of data center infrastructures taking the tradeoffs into consideration. The main research problem that we investigate in this thesis is how to increase the power efficiency of data center servers taking into account the power-performance tradeoffs.The main cause for this research is the massive power consumption of data centers that is a concern both from the financial and environmental footprint perspectives. Irrespectively of the approaches taken to enhance data center power efficiency, substantial reductions in the power consumption of data center servers easily lead to performance degradation of hosted applications, which causes customers dissatisfaction. Therefore, it is crucial for the data center operators to understand and control the power-performance tradeoffs.The research methods used in this thesis include experiments on real testbeds, applying statistical methods to create power-performance models, development of various optimisation techniques to improve the energy-efficiency of servers, and simulations to evaluate proposed solutions at scale.As a result of the research presented in this thesis, we propose taxonomies for selected aspects of data center configurations, events, management actions, and monitored metrics. We discuss the relationships between these elements and to support the analysis present results from a set of testbed experiments.We show limitations in the applicability of various data center management actions, including Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS), Running Average Power Limit (RAPL), CPU Pinning, horizontal and vertical scaling. Finally, we propose a power budgeting controller that minimizes the performance degradation while enforcing the power limits.The outcomes of this thesis can be used by the data center operators to improve the energy-efficiency of servers and reduce the overall power consumption with minimized performance degradation. Moreover, the software artifacts including virtual machine images, scripts, and simulator are available online.Future work includes further investigation of the problem of graceful performance degradation under power limits, incorporating multi-layer applications spread among several servers and load balancing controller.