Energy-Efficient Query Processing in Web Search Engines

Web search engines are composed by thousands of query processing nodes, i.e., servers dedicated to process user queries. Such many servers consume a significant amount of energy, mostly accountable to their CPUs, but they are necessary to ensure low latencies, since users expect sub-second response times (e.g., 500 ms). However, users can hardly notice response times that are faster than their expectations. Hence, we propose the Predictive Energy Saving Online Scheduling Algorithm (PESOS) to select the most appropriate CPU frequency to process a query on a per-core basis. PESOS aims at process queries by their deadlines, and leverage high-level scheduling information to reduce the CPU energy consumption of a query processing node. PESOS bases its decision on query efficiency predictors, estimating the processing volume and processing time of a query. We experimentally evaluate PESOS upon the TREC ClueWeb09B collection and the MSN2006 query log. Results show that PESOS can reduce the CPU energy consumption of a query processing node up to $48 percent compared to a system running at maximum CPU core frequency. PESOS outperforms also the best state-of-the-art competitor with a $20 percent energy saving, while the competitor requires a fine parameter tuning and it may incurs in uncontrollable latency violations