(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010)
Amur, Hrishikesh; Prvulovic, Milos; Schwan, Karsten
The alarming growth of the power consumption of data centers
coupled with low average utilization of servers suggests
the use of power management strategies. Such actions however
require the understanding of the effects of the power
management actions on the performance of data center applications
running on managed platforms. The goal of our
research is to accurately estimate power savings and consequent
performance degradation from DVFS and thereby
better guide the optimization of a performance/power metric
of a platform. Towards that end, this paper presents
precise performance and power models for DVFS strategies.
Precise models are attained by better modeling the
performance behavior of modern out-of-order processors, by
taking into account, for instance, the effects of cache miss
overlapping. Models are validated using benchmarks from
the SPEC CPU2006 suite, which show that the observed
degradation always falls within the predicted bounds. Also,
the upper bound degradation estimates were up to 43% less
than those due to a linear degradation model which allows
for the aggressive use of DVFS.