of the Thesis Energy and Performance Evaluation of Lossless File Data Compression on Computer Systems by Rachita Kothiyal Master of Science in Computer ScienceStony Brook University 2009Data compression has been claimed to be an attractive solution to save energy consumption in high-end servers and data centers. However, there has not been a study to explore this. In this thesis, we present a comprehensive evaluation of energy consumption for various file compression techniques implemented in software. We apply various compression tools available on Linux to a variety of data files, and we try them on server, workstation and laptop class systems. We compare their energy and performance results against raw reads and writes. Our results reveal that software based data compression cannot be considered as a universal solution to reduce energy consumption. Various factors like the type of the data file, the compression tool being used, the read-to-write ratio of the workload, and the hardware configuration of the system impact the efficacy of this technique. We found that in some cases, compression can save as much as 33% energy and improve performance by 37.85%. However, in other cases we found that compression can increase energy consumption 7 times and deteriorate performance 4 fold.iii To my parents and my sisters, Ruchi and Rachna.