Paper Co-written by Doctoral Student Receives Best Paper Award at the IEEE GreenCom
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“Optimized Thermal-aware Workload Distribution Considering Allocation Constraints in Data Centers” is the title of the paper co-writen by Senbo Fu, dual degree doctoral student in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), recipient of the Best Paper Award at the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Green Computing and Communications (IEEE GreenCom), last August in China. |
Co-written with Hassan Shamalizadeh (IEETA), Luis Almeida (FEUP/IT), Shuai Wan (FEUP/IT), Paulo Amaral (FEUP/IT), Shashi Prabh (FEUP/IT), this paper addresses a concern with power management, which is increasingly critical for sustainable datacenters. The authors focused their research on a particular aspect that has a strong impact on the power consumed by a datacenter, which is how the workload is distributed among its servers.
The authors of the paper present “a workload distribution optimization method for homogeneous server environments that minimizes total heat recirculation,” according to the abstract of the paper. The authors used “a parameter to constrain the total contribution of each node to the recirculated heat and (…) show that such parameter allows fine-grained control over the number of needed servers and consequently over the balance between IT computing power and cooling power needs.” Additionally, the method incorporated “allocation constraints, representing cases where specific workloads must be allocated to a specific subset of servers only, which for example, result from Service-Level-Agreements with datacenter customers.” The authors “carry out simulation experiments using measurement data provided by the Bluesim tool,” and the results “show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in controlling the active servers, thus total power, needed for a given workload while meeting allocation constraints.”
For Senbo Fu, the involvement in this paper, and this award, open another application area for his research topic, which is Cloud Computing. His expectations are to “be wider in this hot topic, including resource allocation, energy efficiency, power management, fault tolerance, and data center management.”
Senbo Fu is a dual degree doctoral student in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), from the Faculdade de Ciências of the Universidade do Porto (FCUP) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He began his doctoral studies in the academic year 2012/2013, and he is co-advised by Professors Rui Prior, at FCUP, and Hyong Kim, at CMU. Senbo Fu is a dual degree doctoral student of the CMU Portugal Program, which is funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).
September 2013
Acronyms
CMU – Carnegie Mellon University
FCT – Portuguese Foundation for Science and Tecnology
FCUP – Faculdade de Ciências of the Universidade do Porto
FEUP – Faculdade de Engenharia of the Universidade do Porto
IEEETA – Institute of Electronics and Telematics Engineering of Aveiro
IT – Telecommunications Institute
