ALPACA: Application Performance Aware Server Power Capping

Server power capping limits the power consumption of a server to not exceed a specific power budget. This allows data center operators to reduce the peak power consumption at the cost of performance degradation of hosted applications. Previous work on server power capping rarely considers Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of consolidated services when enforcing the power budget. In this paper, we introduce ALPACA, a framework to reduce QoS violations and overall application performance degradation for consolidated services. ALPACA reduces unnecessary high power consumption when there is no performance gain, and divides the power among the running services in a way that reduces the overall QoS degradation when the power is scarce. We evaluate ALPACA using four applications: MediaWiki, SysBench, Sock Shop, and CloudSuite's Web Search benchmark. Our experiments show that ALPACA reduces the operational costs of QoS penalties and electricity by up to 40% compared to a non optimized system.