Towards Energy-Proportional State-Machine Replication

The energy consumption of state-of-the-art systems applying state-machine replication in general is not proportional to the performance they provide. This is mainly due to the fact that current implementations rely on static replica configurations, for example with regard to the number of threads to be used, which prevent them from adjusting their resource footprints to changing load levels. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting a mechanism that allows a replica to adapt its energy consumption by switching between configurations at runtime. Furthermore, we study the effectiveness of different energy-saving techniques and their impact on peak performance. Our evaluation results for a Byzantine fault-tolerant coordination service show that utilizing such knowledge in combination with our mechanism, it is possible to build energy-proportional replicated systems.