A New System Architecture For Green Enterprise Computing

Maria Kazandjieva - Stanford University

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

Computing systems account for at least 13% of the electricity use of office buildings. This translates to about 2% of the electricity consumption of the entire US. (The equivalent of the State of New Jersey!) As computing becomes pervasive, making these systems more efficient is an opportunity to make a positive change. First, I will argue that the current understanding of energy consumption in office buildings is too limited and coarse-grained. Without better visibility into how electricity is spent and how much of it is wasted, we cannot start thinking about how to reduce its use. I will present Powernet, a multi-year power and utilization study of the compute infrastructure in Gates. I will then use the Powernet data to propose a novel system architecture for office computing, Anyware, that replaces desktops while retaining performance. Anyware’s hybrid design splits workload execution between a local low-power client device and a virtual machine (VM) on a backend server. Anyware reduces the energy cost of computing by 70%--80% because the client has power draw comparable to that of a thin client or a laptop (15 to 20 watts) while the server can host multiple user VMs. Fast I/O, the availability of network resources in a LAN environment, and the increased CPU and memory on the server mean that users can get comparable performance at the fraction of the energy cost. Anyware demonstrates that with a new computing architecture, it is possible to have the best of two worlds: desktop performance at the energy costs of thin clients.