Better energy-delay tradeoff via server resource pooling

Abstract

Multi-core architectures have supplanted single core schemes, because they reduce energy consumption by allowing lower clock frequencies. They provide the additional, less exploited benefit of allowing a trade-off between energy consumption and delay by turning off subsets of cores. We investigate what the benefits of this transition are in managing the tradeoff between energy consumption and delay performance, and whether heterogeneity brings additional benefits to outweigh its increased complexity. To do this, we study optimal sleep policies in two settings: switching of homogeneous cores on a fast timescale, which models multiple cores in a CPU, and switching of heterogeneous cores on a s..