Architecture and Mechanisms of Energy Auto-Tuning

Energy efficiency of IT infrastructures has been a well-discussed research topic for several decades. The resulting approaches include hardware optimizations, resource management in operating systems, network protocols, and many more. The approach the authors present in this chapter is a self-optimization technique for IT infrastructures, which takes hard- and software components as well as users of software applications into account. It is able to ensure minimal energy consumption for a user request along with a set of non-functional requirements (e.g., the refresh rate of a data extraction tool). To optimize the ratio between utility of end users and the cost in terms of energy consumption, the system needs inherent variability leading to differentiated energy profiles and mechanisms to reconfigure the system at runtime. The authors present their approach called Energy Auto-Tuning (EAT) comprised of these mechanisms and an architecture which automatically tunes the energy efficiency of IT systems