Round Robin Scheduling Not Power-Efficient

Posted by kdawson on Friday May 9, 2008 @03:01AM from the toward-cooler-server-farms dept.

Via_Patrino writes "While having to distribute load between several servers, round robin, or any other technique that balances load equally, is the most common approach because of its simplicity. But a recent study shows that trying to accumulate load on some servers can improve energy efficiency because the other servers will be mostly unused during off-peak periods and then able to make better use of power saving methods. Specially, where load involves lots of concurrent power-consuming TCP connections, which was the case in the study, a new load-balancing algorithm resulted in an overall 30% power savings. Here's the paper (PDF)."

1 of 141 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

IT discovers boiler scheduling by Animats · 2008-05-09 03:14 · Score: 5, Interesting

Operators of multiple steam boilers have been dealing with this problem for a century. The number of boilers fired up is adjusted with demand, with the need for some demand prediction because it takes time to get steam up. This was done manually for decades; now it's often automated.
The same thing applies to multiple HVAC compressors. Usually there's a long-term round-robin switch so that the order of compressor start is rotated on a daily or weekly basis to equalize wear.
More and more, IT is becoming like stationary engineering.