Skip to main navigation Skip to search Skip to main content

DIMMer: A case for turning off DIMMs in clouds

  • Stony Brook University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

Lack of energy proportionality in server systems results in significant waste of energy when operating at low utilization, a common scenario in today's data centers. We propose DIMMer, an approach to eliminate the idle power consumption of unused system components, motivated by two key observations. First, even in their lowest-power states, the power consumption of server components remains significant. Second, unused components can be powered off entirely without sacrificing server availability. We demonstrate that unused memory capacity can be powered off, eliminating the energy waste of self-refresh for unallocated memory, while still allowing for all capacity to be available on a moment's notice. Similarly, only one CPU socket must remain powered on, allowing unused CPUs and attached memory to be powered off entirely. The DIMMer vision can improve energy proportionality and achieve energy savings. Using a Google cluster trace as well as in-house experiments, we estimate up to 50% savings on DRAM and 18.8% on CPU background energy. At $0.10/kWh, this corresponds to 0.6% of total data center cost.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 5th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, SOCC 2014
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)1595930361, 9781450332521
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 3 2014
Event5th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, SOCC 2014 - Seattle, United States
Duration: Nov 3 2014Nov 5 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 5th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, SOCC 2014

Conference

Conference5th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, SOCC 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle
Period11/3/1411/5/14

Keywords

  • Cloud computing
  • DRAM
  • Energy

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'DIMMer: A case for turning off DIMMs in clouds'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this