Power Consumption and Computation Models of a Storage Server

Abstract

It is now critical to reduce electric energy consumed in a cluster of servers, especially scalable systems including a huge number of servers like cluster computing systems. Types of application processes like computation, storage, and communication processes are performed on servers in clusters. In clusters, most applications use not only CPU resources but also storage drives like database and web applications. In this paper, we consider storage processes which read and write files in storage devices. The SPCS model (simple power consumption model for a storage server) shows how much electric power a server consumes to perform storage and computation processes. In our macro-level approach, we first measure the electric power consumed by a whole server to perform storage and computation processes and the computation time of each process. Then, we define the SPCS model of a server to perform storage and computation processes by abstracting parameters like number of processes which dominate the electric power consumption. We also define a simple computation model for a storage server (SPCS model) to perform storage and computation processes.