DATE: Thursday, September 1, 2011
     TIME: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm 
     PLACE: Gates 8102
SPEAKER: Anshul Gandhi, CMU
TITLE: AutoScale: Dynamic Power Management for Multi-Tier Data Centers
ABSTRACT: 
  Energy costs for data centers continue to double every 5 years,  already exceeding $15 billion yearly. Sadly much of this power is  wasted. Servers are only busy 10-30%, but they are often left on,  while idle, utilizing 60% or more of peak power when in the idle  state. 
We introduce a power management algorithm, AutoScale, that greatly reduces power costs in data centers driven by unpredictable, time- varying load, while meeting response time SLAs. AutoScale scales the data center capacity, turning servers on and off as needed.
We evaluate our power-management approach via implementation on a 38- server multi-tier data center, serving a web site of the type seen in Facebook or Amazon, with a key-value store workload. We find that AutoScale improves upon the current static power management used in data centers by up to 50% with respect to power, and furthermore, vastly improves upon existing dynamic power management policies with respect to meeting SLAs and robustness.
 BIO: 
  Anshul Gandhi is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at  Carnegie Mellon University, under the direction of Mor Harchol-Balter.  His research involves designing and implementing power management  policies for datacenters as well as general performance modeling of  computer systems. 
SDI / ISTC Seminar Questions?
    Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/
