Accurate Mutlicore Processor Power Models for Power-Aware Resource Management

Power management is one of the biggest challenges facing current data centers. As processors consume the dominant amount of power in computer systems, power management of multicore processors is extremely significant. An efficient power model that accurately predict the power consumption of a processor is required to develop effective power management techniques. However, this challenge rises with using virtualization and increasing number of cores in the processors. In this paper, we analyze power consumption of a multicore processor, we develop three statistical CPU-Power models based on the number of active cores and average running frequency using a multiple liner regression. Our models are built upon a virtualized server. The models are validated statistically and experimentally. Statistically, our models cover 97% of system variations. Furthermore, we test our models with different workloads and three benchmarks. The results show that our models achieve better performance compared to the recently proposed model for power management in virtualized environments. Our models provide highly accurate predictions for un-sampled combinations of frequency and cores, 95% of the predicted values have less than 7% error. Thus, we can integrate these models into power management mechanisms for a dynamic configuration of a virtual machine in terms of the number of its virtual-CPUs and the frequency of physical cores to achieve both performance and power constrains.