Conserving Energy in Real Time Parallel Disk

Systems
Mais Nijim
AbstractIn this paper, we propose an adaptive energy conservation algorithm (DCAPS) with guaranteed performance levels
for parallel disk systems under varying workload conditions. The novel framework uses data partitioning to achieve highest
degree of data parallelism, estimates the expected response times for parallel disk systems, and uses adaptive voltage scaling
to determine the optimal value of the power supply levels for each disk while guaranteeing the a-priori performance levels, i.e.,
the desired response times, for disk requests. The experimental results have illustrated that the proposed DCAPS algorithm
significantly reduces the energy consumption level of parallel disk systems in dynamic environments over traditional disk
systems without the DCAPS strategy.
Index Terms Data partitioning, Dynamic voltage scaling, Parallel disk systems, Response time.

1 INTRODUCTION
arallel disk storage systems have proven viable for a
wide range of data-intensive applications for superior
performance. Being highly scalable and manipulating
high degree of parallelism, the parallel disk systems have
alleviated the Input/Output (I/O) bottleneck problem in
many implementations such as video surveillance [1],
remote-sensing database systems [3], digital libraries [30],
and long running simulations [31]. Since the speed gap
between central processing unit (CPU) and disk I/O have
widened over the years [24], the performance of data-
intensive applications has tracked the performance of the
disk systems [21][22]. The associated disk scheduling al-
gorithms such as shortest seek time first (SSTF) or
(SCAN) have been developed to reduce the performance
gap [4][10][27][32][35]. The SSTF algorithm is efficient to
minimize seek times but is starvation-bound and unfair in
nature [5]. The SCAN algorithm can both solve the un-
fairness problem in SSTF and optimize seeks times [5]. A
parameterized generalization of SCAN and SSTF has also
been developed to utilize the favorable sides of both algo-
rithms [25]. However, in addition to desired improve-
ments, enhancements on parallel disk systems have
created a number of unwanted outcomes such as high
power consumption while providing better system per-
formances. Moreover, many contemporary disk schedul-
ing algorithms are not adequate for an adaptive energy
conservation approach.
Parallel disk system hardware components have been
identified to consume a substantial amount of power in
data centers, such as heat producing components, back-
up power components and cooling equipments. A typical
data center consumes power between 75 W/ft
2
and 150-
200 W/ft
2
while almost 27% of the power consumption is
due to storage devices [34] and anticipated power con-
sumption trend in the near future will only amplify the
depth of the energy optimization problem [17]. Energy
optimization in disk systems implies favorable operation-
al cost for a data center and lower back-up power as well
as cooling equipment expenses, even with faster and po-
werful disks. In addition to possible hardware solutions,
energy-efficient systems can also be designed via low
computational complexity software techniques. Although
contemporary parallel disk system development efforts
aim high performance and energy efficiency, an adaptive
methodology to minimize power consumption in dynam-
ically changing workload conditions is not yet imple-
mented. The power optimization problem becomes high-
ly critical and complex for data-intensive applications
with a-priori desired response times for disk requests.
Next-generation parallel disk systems need to manipu-
late different types of I/O parallelism and to adjust pow-
er consumption according to desired performance specifi-
cations and varying load conditions. A data request paral-
lelism degree determines the number of disks where the
requested data resides [26]. The inter-request parallelism
implies multiple independent disk requests, served si-
multaneously by a parallel disk array. On the other hand,
the intra-request parallelism allows a single disk request
to be processed by multiple disks in a parallel disk array.
As data-intensive applications are subject to dynamic I/O
pattern as well as desired performance variations, parallel
disk systems need to be able to respond accordingly to
optimize energy consumption and response times during
program executions. Thus, adaptive energy conservation
in parallel disk systems becomes critical for data-
intensive applications with a-priori known disk request
response times. This research proposes an adaptive ener-
gy conservation algorithm (DCAPS) that uses a dynamic
voltage scaling (DVS) technique both to determine the
optimal disk supply voltage levels for minimum power
consumption and to guarantee the disk request desired
response times by utilizing the disk scheduling mechan-
isms. The proposed algorithm overcomes currently in-
adequate disk scheduling algorithm deficiencies, easily
handles both inter-request and intra-request data parallel-

- Authors are with the Texas A&M University Kingsville,Kingsville,TX
78363

P
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isms, and significantly outperforms in terms of energy
conservation against disk systems without DCAPS strate-
gy according to simulation results.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2
summarizes the related work. Section 3 describes archi-
tecture for energy-efficient parallel disk systems; the
adaptive energy-conservation algorithm is presented in
Section 4 while the performance analysis is detailed in
Section 5. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper with
possible future directions.
2 RELATED WORK
The disk I/O performance bottleneck problem in data-
intensive applications has produced a number of different
approaches such as an on-line buffer management and
scheduling algorithm that improves the performance of a
parallel disk system [12], performance tuning approach of
parallel systems via stripping and load balancing [26], a
practical model for parallel disk systems [23], and various
write-back policies applicable in a parallel file system
implementation [13].
The proposed research in this paper is unique to inves-
tigate energy conservation for parallel disk systems.
Moreover, the proposed DCAPS algorithm exhibits or-
thogonality with the existing techniques such that the
proposed algorithm can be readily integrated into exist-
ing parallel disk systems to substantially improve energy
efficiency and performance of the systems.
Energy conservation concept has mainly focused on
single storage system such as extending mobile device
battery life and has recently proposed associated algo-
rithms such as dynamic power management schemes
[6][16], power aware cache management strategies [33],
power aware perfecting schemes [28], software-directed
power management techniques [29], redundancy tech-
niques [29], and multi-speed settings [8][9][14]. However,
energy conservation for parallel disk systems is yet to be
explored to provide significant energy savings for parallel
disk systems while maintaining high performance.
The dynamic voltage scaling technique (DVS) is a
popular energy conservation approach for processors.
The DVS technique dynamically adjusts the voltage
supply levels of processors to conserve energy consump-
tion [11], [15], i.e., processor voltage supplies are scaled
down to the optimal levels based on the operating levels,
effectively reducing power consumption quadratically,
when compared to traditional systems with fixed voltage
supply levels. The proposed DCAPS algorithm is a first
and only technique to exclusively present an adaptive
energy conservation algorithm for energy-efficient paral-
lel disk systems, aiming to guarantee desired perform-
ance levels of data-intensive applications, i.e., it utilizes
DVS to achieve very low power consumption with guar-
anteed response times of disk requests.
3 SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
The proposed framework to develop the adaptive energy-
conservation technique for parallel disk systems is shown
in Fig.1, with a generalization capability to accommodate
a wide range of storage systems, including both network
attached storage devices (NAS) and storage area net-
works (SAN). The framework accommodates a parallel
disk system, networks, and the proposed DCAPS algo-
rithm that includes an adaptive energy-conserving me-
chanism, a response time estimator, and a data partition-
ing mechanism.

Fig. 1. The Proposed Framework for the Adaptive Energy Conserva-
tion Algorithm



The heart of the DCAPS algorithm is the energy-
conservation mechanism that is responsible for adaptive-
ly adjusting the power supply levels to achieve optimal
energy consumption in parallel disks without degrading
the desired performance, i.e., obtains the best tradeoff
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between energy efficiency and performance via DVS
technique, as detailed in Section 4.3.The data partitioning
mechanism divides a large amount of data into fixed-size
data units stored on a number of disks. The current study
considers file striping, i.e., a generic method for a vast
variety of data types, and utilizes the response time esti-
mator to predict the response time of a request during the
optimal parallelism degree, which is equal to the stripe
unit size, determination of each disk request, as explained
in Section 4.1. Moreover, the response time estimator is
indispensable for the adaptive energy-conservation me-
chanism during disk request response time estimations to
save energy by dynamically adjusting the voltage supply
levels without violating the desired response time re-
quirements, as outlined in Section 4.2.

3.2 Energy Consumption Model

Assume that a parallel disk system receives a sequence of
disk requests,

{ }
n
r r r R , , ,
2 1
= with each disk request
R r
i
e

has an arrival time a
i
, a desired response time t
i
,
and data size d
i
, e.g., a request r
i
needs to be completed
within the desired response time t
i
. We also assume a
multiple-voltage operation for the parallel disk system
whose supply voltage levels in a finite set V = {v
1
, v
2
, ...,
v
max
}

can instantaneously be switched among voltage le-
vels and the corresponding bandwidth b
i
of the disks can
be determined.
The voltage scaling offers significant potential energy
conservation since energy dissipation in parallel disks is
proportional to supply voltages quadratically, as given
for the energy consumption rate P
i
of the i
th
disk


(1)

where C
1
, C
2
, and o e [1,2] are disk-dependent constants,
v
i,dd
is the supply voltage for the ith disk, and v
t
is the
threshold voltage. Given a disk request r
j
to be processed
by the ith disk, the energy consumption of the request can
be written as

(2)

where V v
j
dd i
e
,
is the voltage supply level determined
for the disk request r
j
, ( )
j
dd i i
v P
,
is the ith disk energy con-
sumption rate, and ( )
j
dd i j
v
,
u is the processing time of the
disk request. Both ( )
j
dd i i
v P
,
and ( )
j
dd i j
v
,
u depend on the
disk supply voltage (
j
dd i
v
,
), as ( )
j
dd i i
v P
,
dependence giv-
en in Eq. (1).
Let D
i
denote a set of disk requests to be processed by
the ith disk in the parallel disk system. Then, the energy
consumption E
i
of ith disk can be written as the sum of
energy consumption of each disk request handled by the
ith disk,

(3)
Now, assuming the parallel disk system having m
disks, the total energy consumption E of the disk system
can be expressed as


(4)

Then, the parallel disk system energy consumption can be
minimized by formulating a nonlinear optimization prob-
lem:

Minimize (5)
Subject to
(a)
(b)
Where f
j
is the response time of the jth disk request, the
performance cost function represents the total energy
consumption, the constraint (a) ensures the available dis-
crete voltage levels, and the constraint-b guarantees the
desired response times of each disk request.
4 PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
The DCAPS algorithm performance was evaluated by
simulating a practical parallel disk system with main spe-
cifications given in Table 1. Also, a data-partitioning algo-
rithm was implemented to optimize parallelism degrees
of large disk requests. The parallel disk system perform-
ance was observed with and without the DCAPS algo-
rithm. In addition, the effects of arrival rate, data size, and
disk bandwidth variations on the disk system perform-
ance were studied. Furthermore, the performances of the
disk systems, with and without DCAPS, were evaluated
in terms of supply voltage level variations and effects of
different parallelism degrees.







TABLE 1
The Parallel Disk System Parameters

Number of Disks 16
Block Size 1KB
Number of tracks per cylinder 11
Number of cylinder per disk 1435
Capacity 80GB
Average seek time 8ms
( )
; , ,
, ,
2
, 2
, 1 t dd i dd i
t dd i
dd i i
v v V v
C
v v
v C P > e

=
o
( ) ( )
j
dd i j
j
dd i i j i
v v P E
, , ,
u =
( ) ( )

e e
= =
i j i j
D r
j
dd i j
j
dd i i
D r
j i i
v v P E E
, , ,
u
( ) ( )

= e = e =
= = =
m
i D r
j
dd i j
j
dd i i
m
i D r
j i
m
i
i
i j i j
v v P E E E
1
, ,
1
,
1
u
( ) ( )

= e
=
m
i D r
j
dd i j
j
dd i i
i j
v v P E
1
, ,
u
{ } ] , 1 [ , , , ,
max 2 1 ,
m i v v v v
j
dd i
e e
j j
t f s
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Spindle Speed 7200 RPM
Highest source voltage (V
max
) 3.3 V
Lowest source voltage (V
min
) 1.2 V
Three source voltage levels 1.2V, 2.4V,
and 3.3V

The DCAPS algorithm performance evaluations were

based on the three performance metrics below:
i. Satisfied ratio: it is a fraction of total arrived disk
requests that are found to be finished within their
desired response times.
ii. Energy consumption: it is the total energy con-
sumed by the parallel disk systems.
iii. Energy conservation ratio.


4.1 Impact of Disk Request Arrival Time
The simulation results for both a parallel disk system
with the DCAPS algorithm and a standard parallel disk
system with a fixed voltage supply level were evaluated,
and the disk request arrival rate impacts on the satisfied
ratio and normalized energy consumption values were
quantified when the disk request arrival rates were varied
between 0.1 to 0.5 No./Sec with an increment of 0.1
No./Sec. For the two disk systems, the corresponding
satisfied ratio and normalized energy consumption cha-
racteristics are given in Fig. 3. As seen in Fig. 3(a), both
parallel disk systems result in similar satisfied ratios,
mainly due to the DCAPS algorithm efforts to save ener-
gy consumption at the marginal cost of satisfied ratio.
Nevertheless, the DCAPS algorithm significantly reduces
the energy consumption in the parallel disk system by up
















4.2 Impact of Parallelism Degree
The disk I/O parallelisms are implemented in forms
of inter-request and intra-request parallelisms and the
intra-request parallelism is considered in this study since
the inter-request parallelism is a special case of the intra-
request parallelism. The request arrival rate was set to 0.3
No/sec. and the disk bandwidth was adjusted to
30MB/sec during the simulations. As the degree of paral-
lelism was varied from 2 to 16, the two disk system satis-
fied ratios were improved as shown in Fig. 4(a), partially
due to the higher parallelism degrees allowing larger
number of disk requests to simultaneously being served
by multiple disks in the systems. Thus, higher data paral-
lelism degrees substantially enhance throughput of the
parallel disk systems, effectively ensuring desired re-
sponse times for higher number of requests. It is intri-
guing that higher parallelism degrees result in lower
normalized energy consumption as shown in Fig. 4(b),
possibly due to the large striping widths substantially
reducing the response times and allowing DVS for lower
supply voltage levels. The energy conservation ratio in-
creases with increasing values of parallelism degree, due
to enhanced system throughput and larger area of poten-
tial energy savings with higher parallelism degrees.










































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6 CONCLUSION
A novel parallel disk system adaptive energy conserva-
tion algorithm was proposed to achieve both highest feas-
ible energy efficiency and guaranteed response time per-
formance specification by dynamically adjusting the disk
voltage supply levels to the optimal levels, significantly
reducing the energy consumption during data-intensive
and varying-load applications. The simulation results
successfully illustrate that the proposed algorithm can
achieve remarkable energy efficiency over standard paral-
lel disk systems with a fixed supply voltage.
The proposed algorithm is currently being explored to
develop a dynamic voltage scaling technique at the level
of data intensive applications. In addition, this novel al-
Fig. 3. The disk system performances for varying data request arrival rates when the
disk bandwidth is 30MB/sec; a) Satisfied ratio, b) Normalized energy consumption

Fig. 4. The disk system performances for varying parallelism degrees when the request arrival rate=0.3
no/sec and the disk bandwidth=30MB/sec; a) Satisfied ratio, b) Normalized energy consumption

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gorithm can be extended to include the overhead of scal-
ing disk supply voltages.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
THIS WORK WAS SUPPORTED IN PART BY A GRANT FROM NSF,
CNS 1129485, CNS 1129485, AND DOTTERWEICH COLLEGE
OF ENGINEERING AT TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY KINGSVILLE.

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