ESAVE: Estimating Server and Virtual Machine Energy

Abstract

Sustainable software engineering has received a lot of attention in recent times, as we witness an ever-growing slice of energy use, for example, at data centers, as software systems utilize the underlying infrastructure. Characterizing servers for their energy use accurately without being intrusive, is therefore important to make sustainable software deployment choices. In this paper, we introduce ESAVE which is a machine learning-based approach that leverages a small set of hardware attributes to characterize a server or virtual machine's energy usage across different levels of utilization. This is based upon an extensive exploration of multiple ML approaches, with a focus on a minimal set of required attributes, while showcasing good accuracy. Early validations show that ESAVE has only around 12% average prediction error, despite being non-intrusive.