Testbed architecture for generic , energy-aware evaluations and optimisations

Abstract

Worldwide data centers CO2 emissions are equivalent already to about the total airlines CO2 emissions and are expected to overcome the 40% of Total Cost of Ownership of worldwide IT by 2012. Data centre electricity consumption accounts for almost 2% of the world production and their overall carbon emissions are greater than both Argentina and the Netherlands. Since computing demand and electricity prices rise, posing new environmental concerns, and due to limited resources, energy consumption of IT systems and data centre energy efficiency are expected to become a priority for the industry. In particular within the HPC domain the continuously raising energy consumption is seen as a major issue to be addressed. Therefore, new approaches are required facing this challenging issue. In this paper, we are going to present the setup of a testbed architecture and realisation in order to enable the evaluation of a broad range of differing (infrastructure) environments whilst keeping the maintenance efforts as little as possible. Therefore, the presented testbed architecture allows for the best possible inspection of the entire testbed environment for evaluation issues, in particular with respect to the evaluation and comparison of the energy efficiency of different approaches and environmental settings.