Energy proportional and opportunistic computing systems

With the emergence of the Future Internet and the dawning of new IT models such as cloud computing, the usage of data centers (DC), and consequently their power consumption, increase dramatically. Besides the ecological impact, the energy consumption is a predominant criteria for DC providers since it determines the daily cost of their infrastructure. As a consequence, power management becomes one of the main challenges for DC infrastructures and more generally for large-scale distributed systems. In this paper, we present the EPOC project which focuses on optimizing the energy consumption of mono-site DCs connected to the regular electrical grid and to renewable energy sources. 

In this project, partners aim at focusing on energy-aware task execution from the hardware to application's components in the context of a mono-site data center (all resources are in the same physical location) which is connected to the regular electric Grid and to renewable energy sources (such as windmills or solar cells).

We propose to address three major challenges in this context :

  • Optimizing the energy consumption of distributed infrastructures and service compositions in the presence of ever more dynamic service applications and ever more stringent availability requirements for services.
  • Designing a clever cloud's resource management which takes advantage of renewable energy availability to perform opportunistic tasks, then exploring the trade-off between energy saving and performance aspects in large-scale distributed system.
  • Investigating energy-aware optical ultra high-speed interconnection networks to exchange large volumes of data (VM memory and storage) over very short periods of time.

One of the strengths of the proposal is to provide a systematic approach, and use a single model for the system (from hard to soft) by mixing constraint programming and behavioral models to manage energy consumption in data centers.

The consortium involves the following people and teams:

·         Pr Nicolas Beldiceanu1, PhD Bàrbara Dumas Feris2, Pr Philippe Gravey2, PhD Sabbir Hasan3, Pr Claude Jard4, Ass Pr Thomas Ledoux1b, PhD Yunbo Li1, Ass Pr Didier Lime5, PhD Gilles Madi-Wamba1, Pr Jean-Marc Menaud1, Ass Pr Pascal Morel6, Michel Morvan2, Marie-Laure Moulinard2, R Anne-Cécile Orgerie7, Pr Jean-Louis Pazat3, Pr Olivier Roux5 and Pr Ammar Sharaiha6

·       1Mines de Nantes, LINA,2Telecom Bretagne, LabSTICC, 3INSA de Rennes, IRISA, 4Université de Nantes, LINA 5Ecole Centrale de Nantes, IRCCyN, 6ENIB, LabSTICC-ENIB, 7CNRS, IRISA,

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Contact: menaud@mines-nantes.fr