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Energy consumption is a major and costly problem in data centers. A large fraction of this energy goes to powering idle machines that are not doing any useful work. We identify two causes of this inefficiency: low server utilization and a lack of power-proportionality. To address this problem we present a design for an power-proportional cluster consisting of a power-aware cluster manager and a set of heterogeneous machines. Our design makes use of currently available energy-efficient hardware, mechanisms for transitioning in and out of low-power sleep states, and dynamic provisioning and scheduling to continually adjust to workload and minimize power consumption. With our design we are able to reduce energy consumption while maintaining acceptable response times for a web service workload based on Wikipedia. With our dynamic provisioning algorithms we demonstrate via simulation a 63% savings in power usage in a typically provisioned datacenter where all machines are left on and awake at all times. Our results show that we are able to achieve close to 90% of the savings a theoretically optimal provisioning scheme would achieve. We have also built a prototype cluster which runs Wikipedia to demonstrate the use of our design in a real environment.

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