An Empirical Study on the Impact of an Idle Limit in Distributed Systems

In this paper we empirically investigate the impact of an idle limit on a distributed system. A series of experiments was conducted to examine the effect of introducing an idle limit into the power management system for a cluster. The experiments tested the total power consumption of the cluster, as well as the number of times the nodes were cycled between power states. The idle limit was not proven to have an impact on the total power consumption, however, it was shown to have an impact on the number of power transitions. In some cases the addition of the idle limit was able to reduce the number of power transitions by 80%.