A Power-Aware Cloud Architecture with Smart Metering

With the growing interest of cloud computing and carbon emission reduction, how to build energy efficient cloud architecture becomes a crisis issue for service providers. In this paper, we propose a power-aware cloud architecture based on DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot in Linux), cpufreqd and xenpm. We also introduce a low-cost smart metering system based on open hardware Arduino board. Composing with existing technique, such as Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS), ACPI, diskless design and RAM disk storage, our experiment results show that this architecture will reduce energy consumption from 4 to 11% when running CPU-intensive applications. In conclusion, this paper reveals that service providers could benefit from diskless design and RAM disk storage if their applications are CPU-intensive.