"Lazy Scheduling Based Disk Energy Optimization Method" by Yong Dong, Juan Chen et al.

Article Title

Lazy Scheduling Based Disk Energy Optimization Method

Authors

Yong Dong, the School of Computer Science, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China.
Juan Chen, the School of Computer Science, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China.
Yuhua Tang, the School of Computer Science, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China.
Junjie Wu, the School of Computer Science, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China.
Huiquan Wang, the National Innovation Institute of Defense Technology, Beijing 100091, China.
Enqiang Zhou, the School of Computer Science, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China.

Keywords

high-performance computing system, storage systems, disk energy savings, lazy scheduling, disk seek, time window

Abstract

Reducing the energy consumption of the storage systemâs disk read/write requests plays an important role in improving the overall energy efficiency of high-performance computing systems. We propose a method to reduce disk energy consumption by delaying the dispatch of disk requests to the end of a time window, which we call time window-based lazy scheduling. We prove that sorting requests within a single time window can reduce the disk energy consumption, and we discuss the relationship between the size of the time window and the disk energy consumption, proving that the energy consumption is highly likely to decrease with increasing window size. To exploit this opportunity, we propose the Lazy Scheduling based Disk Energy Optimization (LSDEO) algorithm, which adopts a feedback method to periodically adjust the size of the time window, and minimizes the local disk energy consumption by sorting disk requests within each time window. We implement the LSDEO algorithm in an OS kernel and conduct both simulations and actual measurements on the algorithm, confirming that increasing the time window increases disk energy savings. When the average request arrival rate is 300 and the threshold of average request response time is 50 ms, LSDEO can yield disk energy savings of 21.5%.