PowerPerfCenter: a power and performance prediction tool for multi-tier applications

The performance analysis of a server application and the sizing of the hardware required to host it in a data center continue to be pressing issues today. With most server-grade computers now built with "frequency-scaled CPUs" and other such devices, it has become important to answer performance and sizing questions in the presence of such hardware. PowerPerfCenter is an application performance modeling tool that allows specification of devices whose operating speeds can change dynamically. It also estimates power usage by the machines in presence of such devices. Furthermore, it allows specification of a dynamic workload which is required to understand the impact of power management. We validated the performance metrics predicted by PowerPerfCenter against measured ones of an application deployed on a test-bed consisting of frequency-scaled CPUs, and found the match to be good. We also used PowerPerfCenter to show that power savings may not be significant if a device does not have different idle power consumption when configured with different operating speeds.