A Dynamic Server Power Mode Control for Saving Energy in a Server Cluster Environment

All the servers in a traditional server cluster environment are kept On. If the request load reaches to the maximum, we exploit its maximum possible performance, otherwise, we exploit only some portion of maximum possible performance so that the efficiency of server power consumption becomes low. We can improve the efficiency of power consumption by controlling power mode of servers according to load situation, that is, by making On only minimum number of servers needed to handle current load while making Off the remaining servers. In the existing power mode control method, they used a static policy to decide server power mode at a fixed time interval so that it cannot adapt well to the dynamically changing load situation. In order to improve the existing method, we propose a dynamic server power control algorithm. In the proposed method, we keep the history of server power consumption and, based on it, predict whether power consumption increases in the near future. Based on this prediction, we dynamically change the time interval to decide server power mode. We performed experiments with a cluster of 30 PCs. Experimental results show that our proposed method keeps the same performance while reducing 29% of power consumption compared to the existing method. In addition, our proposed method allows to increase the average CPU utilization by 66%.