Evaluation of energy consumption and data access time in data fetching in grid-based data-intensive applications

Data-intensive applications that involve large amounts of data generation, processing and transmission, have been operated with little attention to energy efficiency. Issues such as management, movement and storage of huge volumes of data may lead to high energy consumption. Replication is a useful solution to decrease data access time and improve performance in these applications, but it may also lead to increase the energy spent in storage and data transmission, by spreading large volumes of data replicas around the network. Thus, utilizing effective strategies for energy saving in these applications is a very critical issue from both the environmental and economical aspects. In this paper, at first we review the current data replication and caching approaches and energy saving methods in the context of data replication. Then, we propose a model for energy consumption during data replication and, finally, we evaluate two schemes for data fetching based on the two critical metrics in Grid environments: energy consumption and data access time. We also compare the gains based on these metrics with the no-caching scenario by using simulation.