Network Packet Processing Mode-Aware Power Management for Data Center Servers

In data center servers, power management (PM) exploiting Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) for processors can play a crucial role to improve energy efficiency. However, we observe that current PM policies (i.e., governors) not only considerably increase tail response time (i.e., violate a given Service Level Objective (SLO)) but also hurt energy efficiency. Tackling limitations of current PM governors, we propose NMAP, Network packet processing Mode-Aware Power management. NMAP improves energy efficiency while satisfying given SLOs, considering packet processing status on a core for PM by monitoring transitions between network packet processing modes - interrupt and polling. Tracking the transitions, NMAP detects moments that a core cannot process packets fast enough and forces the core to immediately raise the voltage and frequency (V/F) state. As a result, NMAP can provide not only low response time but also low energy consumption. Our experiment shows that NMAP improves tail response time by up to 4.1× compared with the ondemand governor, reducing energy by up to 44.6 percent compared with the performance governor.