The Potential of Energy/Utility-Accrual Scheduling

The long term vision of energy/utility accrual scheduling is to use all system resources in a way that is most beneficial to the system´s users. For that, a mapping of user requests all the way down to system resources is required and, vice versa, the energy requirements of resources must be attributed to the corresponding user requests. However, despite the attractiveness of this general approach, the complexities involved in these translations are scary. Sketching our approach to energy/utility accrual scheduling, we argue in this paper that many complexities of traditional power models can be avoided if we consider the potential of a resource to generate utility rather than the utility generating operation. Introducing modes for the resources CPU and network, we found that the energy required to keep these resources operational is a good approximation of their overall energy demand.