Energy-Aware Database Management Systems

Annual energy cost of data centers have reached one billion US dollars in the United States alone. In a typical data center, a significant portion of the computing resources (thus energy) is dedicated to running the back end database service. Therefore, making databases energy-aware is of high economic and sustainability significance. For that purpose, we have launched a research project that aims at the design and implementation of an energy-aware DBMS that enables significant energy conservation (as compared to traditional DBMSs) within a bounded performance penalty. This white paper encapsulates some of the critical ideas we explored and verified in designing such a DBMS.