Safe Overprovisioning: Using Power Limits to Increase Aggregate Throughput

Management of power in data centers is driven by the need to not exceed circuit capacity. The methods employed in the oversight of these power circuits are typically static and ad-hoc. New power-scalable system components allow for dynamically controlling power consumption with an accompanying effect on performance. Because the incremental performance gain from operating in a higher performance state is less than the increase in power, it is possible to overprovision the hardware infrastructure to increase throughput and yet still remain below an aggregate power limit. In overprovisioning, if each component operates at maximum power the limit would be exceeded with disastrous results. However, safe overprovisioning regulates power consumption locally to meet the global power budget. Host-based and network-centric models are proposed to monitor and coordinate the distribution of power with the fundamental goal of increasing throughput. This research work presents the advantages of overprovisioning and describes a general framework and an initial prototype. Initial results with a synthetic benchmark indicate throughput increases of nearly 6% from a staticly assigned, power managed environment and over 30% from an unmanaged environment.