Adaptive Controller for Dynamic Power and Performance Management in the Virtualized Computing Systems

Power and performance management problem in large scale computing systems like data centers has attracted a lot of interests from both enterprises and academic researchers as power saving has become more and more important in many fields. Because of the multiple objectives, multiple influential factors and hierarchical structure in the system, the problem is indeed complex and hard. In this paper, the problem will be investigated in a virtualized computing system. Specifically, it is formulated as a power optimization problem with some constraints on performance. Then, the adaptive controller based on least-square self-tuning regulator(LS-STR) is designed to track performance in the first step; and the resource solved by the controller is allocated in order to minimize the power consumption as the second step. Some simulations are designed to test the effectiveness of this method and to compare it with some other controllers. The simulation results show that the adaptive controller is generally effective: it is applicable for different performance metrics, for different workloads, and for single and multiple workloads; it can track the performance requirement effectively and save the power consumption significantly.