Cost and Energy Reduction Evaluation for ARM Based Web Servers

Olle Svanfeldt-Winter, Sbastien Lafond, Johan Lilius

Sbastien Lafond
sebastien.lafond@abo.fi

13.12.2011

bo Akademi University - Department of Information Technologies

Outlines
Motivations Energy consumption Total energy consumption Energy propositional computing Data Centers Costs Evaluated HW Benchmarks Results Conclusion
13.12.2011 bo Akademi University - Department of Information Technologies 2

Motivations
Energy consumption of data centers is both an economical and environmental issue
important impact on the possibility to construct or expend data centres cooling infrastructures are expensive

Models for data centre costs exists

It is possible to determine the relationship between the total cost of a data center and the energy consumption of its server

13.12.2011

bo Akademi University - Department of Information Technologies

Energy consumption
The two main metrics are:
PUE =
TotalFacilityPower ITequipmentPower
1 100 PUE

DCiE =

Both express the energy efficient of the data center But at the end the total energy consumption matters
this is what you will pay for every month infrastructure design based on the maximum power dissipation of the data center

13.12.2011

bo Akademi University - Department of Information Technologies

Total energy consumption

According to [1] the processors in a typical server contributed to:
45% of the total power dissipation at peak performance 27% when idle

Power dissipation is application specific, but on average the dissipation is 72% of the peak power Google server containers are reported to house 1160 servers and dissipate 250KW each.
[1] L. Barroso and U. Holzle, The case for energy-proportional computing, Computer, vol. 40, no. 12, pp. 3337, December 2007.
13.12.2011 bo Akademi University - Department of Information Technologies 5

Energy propositional computing

Ideally the energy consumption of data centers should be proportional to the required performance
this is unfortunately far from being true energy efficiency is best at peak performance however typical servers operate most of the time at 10 to 50% of their capacity

Using low-end and cheaper processors might be an answer for better energy proportionality
increase the granularity of power management steps

13.12.2011

bo Akademi University - Department of Information Technologies

Data Centers Costs

Based on Hamilton analysis [1,2]
$0,07 per KWh 80% average load usage 50k servers 165 W per server 5% cost of money

10 year amortization time 4 year amortization time for the network 3 year amortization time for the server

[1] J. Hamilton, Cooperative expendable micro-slice servers (cems): Low cost, low power servers for internet-scale services, in Proceedings of CIDR 09, January 2009. [2] Overall data center costs. http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/09/18/overalldatacentercosts.aspx, James Hamilton, September 2010
13.12.2011 bo Akademi University - Department of Information Technologies 7

Evaluated HW
Versatile Express
Quad-core Cortex A9 1GB DDR2 400Mhz

Tegra 250
Dual-core Cortex-A9 1GB DDR2 1Ghz

13.12.2011

bo Akademi University - Department of Information Technologies

Benchmarks
Autobench and Apache 2 HTTP server
static web pages

SPECweb2005
more demanding web services

Erlang
micro benchmarks real world SIP proxy

13.12.2011

bo Akademi University - Department of Information Technologies

Apache

Results

13.12.2011

bo Akademi University - Department of Information Technologies

10

Results
SPECweb2005

13.12.2011

bo Akademi University - Department of Information Technologies

11

Results
Erlang

Calls per dissipated Watt

13.12.2011 bo Akademi University - Department of Information Technologies 12

Conclusion
The performance of 2 ARMv7 based ARM cortex-A9 was measured and evaluated and compared to Xeon processors Measurements show that the Cortex A9 can be up to
11 times more efficient with the Apache server
Enabling a 12,7% total cost saving

3.6 times more efficient with Erlang base SIP proxy

Enabling a 10% total cost saving

2.9 times mote efficient with the SPECweb2005

Enabling a 9% total cost saving
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Questions ?
13.12.2011 bo Akademi University - Department of Information Technologies 14