Characterizing Power and Energy Usage in Cloud Computing Systems

Power and energy are primary concerns in the design and management of modern cloud computing systems and data centers. Operational costs for powering and cooling large-scale cloud systems will soon exceed acquisition costs. To improve the energy effciency of cloud computing systems and applications, it is critical to profile the power usage of real systems and applications. Many factors influence power and energy usage in cloud systems, including each components electrical specification, the system usage characteristics of the applications, and system software. In this work, we present the power profiling results on a cloud test bed. We combine hardware and software that achieves power and energy profiling at server granularity. We collect the power and energy usage data with varying server/cloud configurations, and quantify their correlation. Our experiments reveal conclusively how different system configurations affect the server/cloud power and energy usage.