Research Projects

Directing a Datacenter

Peter Bodik, Charles Sutton, Armando Fox, David A. Patterson and Michael Jordan

This project is focusing on the director, part of the Declarative Datacenter (described elsewhere in this Research Summary). The goal of the director is to allocate resources--such as servers and storage--to web applications running in a datacenter depending on the current workload. Because power is one of the major limiting factors of datacenter growth, the objective of the director is to minimize the power consumption of the datacenter without violating the performance constraints of the applications. The datacenter cost function is used to find the optimal resource allocation; it consists of statistical models that model the relationship between power consumption and performance of the applications (see diagram of the structure of the cost function in Figure 1).

Figure 1: The datacenter cost function is a linear combination of multiple statistical models estimated from data collected in a datacenter.