Alastair Dewhurst | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Improving the Energy Efficiency of High Throughput Computing: A Measurement-Based Case Study

The significant energy consumed by data centers has become a concern both for costs and associated carbon emissions. In particular, the energy efficiency of servers is a key consideration for data center operators, and understanding servers' power consumption under different operating conditions is an important aspect of it. In this paper, we present a measurement-based case study of high-throughput computing. We analyze power usage information of an operational data center, combined with focused measurements of power reduction techniques for a representative high-throughput workload. The study points out the obstacles encountered by data center operators in their efforts to minimize energy consumption and carbon emissions, and discusses the impact of server configuration adjustments on the energy consumption of processing jobs. We offer actionable recommendations for decreasing the energy usage of servers, while considering both performance and carbon emissions.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2015

Enabling Object Storage via shims for Grid Middleware

The Object Store model has quickly become the basis of most commercially successful mass storage infrastructure, backing so-called "Cloud" storage such as Amazon S3, but also underlying the implementation of most parallel distributed storage systems. Many of the assumptions in Object Store design are similar, but not identical, to concepts in the design of Grid Storage Elements, although the requirement for "POSIX-like" filesystem structures on top of SEs makes the disjunction seem larger. As modern Object Stores provide many features that most Grid SEs do not (block level striping, parallel access, automatic file repair, etc.), it is of interest to see how easily we can provide interfaces to typical Object Stores via plugins and shims for Grid tools, and how well experiments can adapt their data models to them. We present evaluation of, and first-deployment experiences with, (for example) Xrootd-Ceph interfaces for direct object-store access, as part of an initiative within GridPP\cite{GridPP} hosted at RAL. Additionally, we discuss the tradeoffs and experience of developing plugins for the currently-popular {\it Ceph} parallel distributed filesystem for the GFAL2 access layer, at Glasgow.

physics.comp-ph↗