A System for Energy-Efficient Data Management

Energy consumption of computer systems has increased at a steep rate in recent years. Following extensive energy-related research and practice in the hardware and OS communities, much attention has been paid to developing energy-efficient applications. With database systems being a heavy energy consumer in modern data centers, we face the challenge of designing DBMSs with energy as a first-class performance goal. This paper presents our on-going work in designing and implementing a DBMS that enables significant energy conservations while maintaining other performance targets. We follow two new strategies in DB-MS implementation to achieve our system design goal. The first one is to change the resource consumption patterns via energy-aware query optimization and reorganizing data records to enable load consolidation in disks. The second strategy is active control of power modes of hardware (i.e., CPU and hard disks) toward energy reduction. Specifically, we use control-theoretic techniques to allow dynamic adjustment of CPU frequency and online data migration to achieve disk load consolidation. Preliminary results have shown the effectiveness of our design.