Large-scale Distributed Systems and Energy Efficiency: A Holistic View

Chapter 2Hardware Leverages for Energy Reduction in Large-Scale Distributed Systems

Davide Careglio², Georges Da Costa,¹ and Sergio Ricciardi²

¹Institute for Research in Informatics of Toulouse (IRIT), University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France

²Department of Computer Architecture (DAC), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya—BarcelonaTech (UPC), Barcelona, Spain

2.1 Introduction

2.1.1 Motivation for Energy-Aware Distributed Computing

In the past years, the Information and Communication Society (ICS) has experienced unprecedented growth in the amount of information being processed, stored, and transferred over the Internet. This is due to the ever increasing number of connected users and demand for rich contents (cloud computing and big data applications, social networks and photo sharing, on-demand video streaming, etc.) that require huge bandwidths and computational/storage capacities. Large-scale distributed systems and network equipment are, therefore, growing in performance and size to support the demand and offer more and more connectivity and services to their clients. It has been estimated that the Internet (including both operational and embodied energy of servers, networking, end users equipment, and mobile telecommunication infrastructures) requires a mean value of 240 GW of power [1], which corresponds roughly to 12.6% of the electrical power produced worldwide. Furthermore, from 2011 to 2015, the total Internet traffic will be three times larger [2], equivalent to ...