Power Characterization of Memory Intensive Applications: Analysis and Implications

DRAM is a significant source of server power consumption especially when the server runs memory intensive applications. Current power aware scheduling assumes that DRAM is as energy proportional as other components. However, the non-energy proportionality of DRAM significantly affects the power and energy consumption of the whole server system when running memory intensive applications. Thus good knowledge of server power characterization under memory intensive workloads can help better workload placement with power reduction. In this paper, we investigate the power characteristics of memory intensive applications on real rack servers of different generations. Through comprehensive analysis we find that (1) Server power consumption changes with workload intensity and concurrent execution threads. However, fully utilized memory systems are not the most energy efficient. (2) Powered memory modules of installed memory capacity, i.e. the memory capacity per processor core has significant impact on the application’s performance and server power consumption even if the memory system is not fully utilized. (3) Memory utilization is not always a good indicator for server power consumption when it is running memory intensive applications. Our experiments show that hardware configuration, workload types, as well as concurrently running threads have significant impact on a server’s energy efficiency when running memory intensive applications. Our findings presented in this paper provide useful insights and guidance to system designers, as well as data center operators for energy efficiency aware job scheduling and power reductions.