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Abstract : |
One unintended effect of the growth of the Internet is increased energy usage by servers and the infrastructure supporting them. This paper promotes a research agenda to improve the energy efficiency of Internet server sites. This goal is timely as the costs of energy usage and our vulnerability to energy supply disruptions become increasingly evident. In particular, we propose energy-conscious server switching as one approach to improving efficiency of server clusters at low request loads. Our proposal builds on the commercial acceptance of loadbalancing server switches and recent industry initiatives to reduce power drain of computer systems running below their peak loads. The potential savings from this technique are compelling given that Internet service loads fluctuate by up to an order of magnitude at all time scales. 1, |
