Benchmarking And Designing For Energy Efficiency: How To Break A World Record In 30 Days

Mehul A. Shah, Hewlett-Packard

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

Energy efficiency is a key concern in contexts ranging from large-scale data centers to mobile devices. This talk discusses our work on benchmarking and designing data-intensive systems for energy efficiency. After mentioning the pitfalls surrounding the creation of JouleSort, a whole-system, energy-based benchmark, the talk will describe the 100GB JouleSort system that can sort 11,300 records for a Joule --- the 2007 world record. Also discussed will be the results and insights from measuring the efficiency of a variety of systems from desktops to embedded devices. Going beyond JouleSort, there are preliminary results characterizing the efficiency of audit-class TPC-H systems, which suggest that in the future software optimizations will play an important role in reducing energy-use. It is to be hoped that the audience will be armed with the tools and know-how to break an energy-efficiency world record in fewer than 30 days.