Energy-aware and Power efficient cloud computing

Aashka Kotecha, Shailee Patel

Computer Science and Engineering(Network Technology)
Nirma University
S.G Highway,Ahmedabad,Gujarat,India
aashka.it@gmail.com
shelypatel@gmail.com
Abstract In the current technology era, cloud
computing has become the most prominent emerging
technology, supporting migration of storage processes to
remote resources like virtual servers stored in systems
which are mostly hosted in the datacentres located in
various places. However, datacentres hosting Cloud
applications consume huge amounts of energy,
contributing to high operational costs and carbon
footprints to the environment. Therefore, we need Green
Cloud computing solutions that can not only save energy
for the environment but also reduce operational costs.
This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural
elements for energy-efficient management of Cloud
computing
environments.
It
enlightens
some
methods,solutions and techniques to reduce power
consumption and hence increase the energy efficiency in
cloud computing.

1. It is sold on demand, either by minute or hour.

2. It is elastic in nature- which means that a user can
have any maximum or minimum amount of service
depending upon their on requirement.
3. The cloud service provider manages the entire
services so a consumer just has to be equipped only
with a personal computer and a strong Internet
access.
.The rest of the paper is organized as follows: In section II
we summarize the cloud infrastructure and its services. In
section III we describe the methods and solutions for
increasing energy efficiency. In section IV we describe the
power measurement parameters. Finally in section V we
conclude our topic.

Keywords power efficiency, energy-aware, cloud computing

Infrastructure-as-a-Service

I. INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing can be defined basically as a
technology that uses a network of remote servers which are
hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data,
instead of a local server or a personal computer. It can also be
called as a virtualized third-party hosting or pay-as-muchyou-use model.
In a cloud computing service, instead of renting
some portion or entire part of an actual physical server from a
hosting company, what one can do is to hire a certain amount
of server . The server runs inside a virtual container, which,
without interrupting any service can be shifted from one
physical server to another. The container is also able to span
multiple physical machines, giving them strong limitless
resources.
In other words, Cloud computing can also be defined
as a new approach for the dynamic provisioning of computing
services which support state-of-the-art data centres that
usually employ Virtual Machine (VM) technologies. Leading
companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and IBM 2 are
rapidly deploying datacentres in various locations around the
world to deliver Cloud computing services.[1]
The three major characteristic features that differentiate cloud
from other traditional hosting are:

II. CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE AND SERVICES

Cloud computing generally involves delivering
hosted services over the Internet by providing three major
category of services which are divided as follows:
(IaaS),

Platform-as-a-Service

(PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).[3]

Software as a ServiceIn this model software and its
computation are centrally controlled on the cloud based on the
user request.[3]
Storage as a ServiceIn this model, users can outsource their
data storage requirement to the cloud. All processing is
performed on the users PC and the users primary data storage
is in the cloud.
Processing as a Service-This model provides user with the
source of a powerful server for specific large computational
tasks. Computing tasks are uploaded in the cloud which are
processed in the cloud, and the results are returned to the user.
A. Infrastructure
The topology of a cloud computing solution consists of three
major components: clients, the datacentre, and distributed
servers. Figure 1 depicts the cloud infrastructure.
Clients:
In a cloud computing architecture, clients resemble the same
to that of a member of a LAN. They are just the normal nodes
or the routine personal computers or laptops, tablet computers,

mobile phones, or PDAs and all such kind of static and mobile
devices.
The end users interact with clients to manage their
information on the cloud. Clients generally fall into three
categories:
1. Mobile: Mobile devices include PDAs or
Smartphone, like a Blackberry, Windows Mobile
Smartphone, or an iPhone.

2. Thin: Thin clients are computers that do not have

internal hard drives, but rather let the servers do the
job and processing.

3. Thick: Thick type of client is a regular computer,

using a web browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer
to connect to the cloud.

roomthey can add them at another site and simply make it

part of the cloud.

III.METHODS AND SOLUTIONS FOR ENERGY EFFICIENCY

Many systems have been proposed which utilize marketbased resource management for various computing areas, but
none of these systems focus on the problem of energy
efficiency in addition to maximising profit. Thus, these
systems are not able to support Green Cloud computing. They
do not offer economic incentives that can encourage,
discourage, or vary quality expectations of service requests
from consumers with respect to energy saving schemes. A
Green Cloud computing model not only facilitates providers
to allocate service allocations efficiently to meet the
customised needs of consumers, but also maximises revenue
intake through more precise and differentiated pricing and
utility policies based on specific consumer profiles.
This is because they only focus on minimising energy
consumption or their costs, and do not consider dynamic
service requirements of consumers that can be changed on
demand in Cloud computing environments. Hence, they do
not emphasise autonomic energy-aware resource management
mechanisms and policies exploiting VM resource allocation
which is the main operating technology in Cloud Computing.
[4]
Hence we suggest some techniques to improve energy
efficiency in cloud computing and reduce power
consumptions to promote green cloud computing:
A. [4]Reduction in CPU Power dissipation

Datacenter:
Datacenter can be defined as a collection of servers
where the application which are subscribed, resides. It could
be a large room in the basement of your building or a room
full of servers on the other side of the world that you access
via the Internet. The future of IT world is leading towards
virtualizing servers. That is, software can be installed allowing
multiple instances of virtual servers to be used. In this way,
you can have half a dozen virtual servers running on one
physical server.
Distributed servers:
The servers need not be present at the same location,
instead they can be at different geographical locations. But to
a cloud subscriber, it appears as if these servers are placed
right next to each other. This gives the service provider more
flexibility in options and security. For instance, Amazon has
their cloud solution in servers all over the world. If something
were to happen at one site, causing a failure, the service would
still be accessed through another site. Also, if the cloud needs
more hardware, they need not throw more servers in the safe

To charge a processor to enable it to perform various

operations like switching devices contained in it, for
cooling of transistors and numerous chips we need to
provide electrical energy(direct supply). It dissipates this
energy in surroundings. Processor dissipates heats but the
amount of heat that is liberated differs from devices to
devices. For e. g processors of different mobile devices,
embedded system consume less power than the processor
of palmtop, netbook, notebook, desktop, laptop, so they
dissipates less energy in surrounding.
Solution: Adapt free cooling so that this power dissipation
can be reduced.
B. [4]Use of advance Clock gating
A hardware switch called Clock gater that is responsible for
activating and deactivating the clock is used. When the logic
block is doing some work the clock of a logic block must be
activated and the clock must be turned off when logic block is
not performing any task. This is a very popular technique used
in many synchronous circuits but it can also be used in
globally asynchronous locally synchronous circuits for
reducing dynamic power dissipation.

C. [4]Use of Split plane power

Originally the term Splitting means division but in
terms of a processor, splitting means division across
horizontal axis. Here processor will not share power plane
with North Bridge (These are the microchips developed by
Intel that makes communication between a CPU and
motherboard possible).Here motherboard supports split
plane power supply and it will deliver separate power
supply to processor and North Bridge. We can even go for
nested splitting i.e. plane power can be divided into any
number of region.

cooling by itself. Free cooling does not reduce the required

fan energy for cooling it just eliminates the need of
mechanical cooling energy.

IV.POWER MEASUREMENT PARAMETERS

The following table states the parameters to calculate the
power efficiency.[4]
No

D. [4]Use of Energy-efficient Processors

With dynamic voltage scaling (decreasing or increasing
the voltage as per the requirements of a device or a
program or hardware etc.) and dynamic frequency scaling
(adjusting the frequency by decreasing or increasing it
according to the requirements of a device or a program or
hardware etc.), the voltage of a processor, clock rate of a
processor or both voltage and clock rate of a processor can
be modified such that the power consumption of CPU is
decreased.
E. [4]Use of Renewable energy sources
All datacentre of clouds required diesel generator to
provide backup power and with datacenter CO2
dissipation they also dissipate GHGs. We can use
renewable energy sources such as hydro energy, wind
energy, solar energy to generate electricity for fulfilling
the power requirement and cooling requirement of these
datacenter.
F. [4]Use of Energy efficient storage
The new invention leads to energy efficient storages that
are capable of replacing existing storages of cloud. Since
the life time of a data centre being limited up to 9 years,
hence while renovating existing data centre,developer can
use energy efficient memory for e.g. solid state storage.
Solid state storage has no moving mechanical component
as hard disk drive has, due to which, it requires less
cooling as compared to hard disk drive so now less energy
will be needed for cooling.

3
4
5
6

7
8

9
10

G. [4]Reduction in Cooling Requirements

Earlier cooling used to be performed with mechanical
refrigerator that takes service of compressor inside the
datacenter or provides externally chilled water to man air
handle for the cooling of IT equipments. Now free cooling
can be used instead of mechanical cooling. Free cooling is
a system developed to optimize or minimize the
requirement of cooling. It says if the air temperature of
outside world is below or at the critical point, then the
mechanical refrigerator can provide direct or indirect

11

Table-1 [4]Power efficiency and its usage.

Parameters
Use
Thermal Design
The amount of power
Power(TDP)
required by a chip
while running a real
time application.
Power usage
Ratio of the electricity
Effectiveness(PUE)
consumed by
datacenter to the
electricity consumed
by IT equipments.
Data center
Inverse of PUE(power
infrastructure
usage effectiveness).
efficiency(DCIE)
Compute power
Ratio of the IT
efficiency(CPE)
equipment utilization
to the PUE.
Energy reuse
Measure of reusable
factor(ERF)
energy.
Carbon usage
Amount of carbon
effectiveness(CUE)
dioxide emitted by the
datacenter in
environment.
Data center
Amount of the work
productivity(DCP)
obtained by the
datacenter.
Data center energy
Amount of the work
productivity(DCEP)
obtained by the
datacenter with
respect to energy used
to obtain this work.
Space,Wattage and
compute the energy
performance(SWAP) and space requirement
of a datacenter.
Green energy
It is a measure of
coefficient(GEC)
energy that
comes from renewable
sources that is used
by the facility of a
datacenter.
Water usage
Measure of water
effectiveness(WUE)
required by the
datacenter annually.

V. CONCLUSION
We can hence conclude that cloud computing can be made
more efficient only if server's energy consumption in the
cloud is saved. In this paper we have suggested some
techniques that can reduce power consumption in cloud and
hence make it more energy efficient. This paper presents that
the performance of cloud mainly depends on the
performance data centres. Green Computing is the future
technology that supports environment, reuse consumed power
and energy, and optimize the resources efficiently. Green
computing focuses on reduction of CO2 emission in
environment and thus makes
IT industry environment friendly.
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Computing: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Open
Challenges, Melbourne,Australia.
[2] S.-i. Kuribayashi, Reducing Total Power Consumption
Method in Cloud Computing Environments, International
Journal of Computer Networks & Communications
(IJCNC), vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 69-84, March,2012.
[3] A. T and S. Hamead H, ENERGY AWARE CLOUD
SERVICE PROVISIONING APPROACH FOR GREEN
COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT, IEEE, pp. 139-145,
2013.
[4] A. Jain, M. Mishra, S. K. Peddoju and N. Jain, Energy
Efficient Computing- Green Cloud Computing, IEEE, pp.
978-983, 2013.