Dynamic Knobs for Responsive Power-Aware Computing

We present PowerDial, a system for dynamically adapting application behavior to execute successfully in the face of load and power fluctuations. PowerDial transforms static configuration parameters into dynamic knobs that the PowerDial control system can manipulate to dynamically trade off the accur...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hoffmann, Henry Christian, Sidiroglou, Stelios, Carbin, Michael James, Misailovic, Sasa, Agarwal, Anant
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/72445
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7015-4262
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0313-9270
Description
Summary:We present PowerDial, a system for dynamically adapting application behavior to execute successfully in the face of load and power fluctuations. PowerDial transforms static configuration parameters into dynamic knobs that the PowerDial control system can manipulate to dynamically trade off the accuracy of the computation in return for reductions in the computational resources that the application requires to produce its results. These reductions translate directly into performance improvements and power savings. Our experimental results show that PowerDial can enable our benchmark applications to execute responsively in the face of power caps that would otherwise significantly impair responsiveness. They also show that PowerDial can significantly reduce the number of machines required to service intermittent load spikes, enabling reductions in power and capital costs.