arXiv subjects

Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos

Publications and source records attributed to Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos.

38 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

Methods and Metrics for Fair Server Assessment under Real-Time Financial Workloads

Energy efficiency has been a daunting challenge for datacenters. The financial industry operates some of the largest datacenters in the world. With increasing energy costs and the financial services sector growth, emerging financial analytics workloads may incur extremely high operational costs, to meet their latency targets. Microservers have recently emerged as an alternative to high-end servers, promising scalable performance and low energy consumption in datacenters via scale-out. Unfortunately, stark differences in architectural features, form factor and design considerations make a fair comparison between servers and microservers exceptionally challenging. In this paper we present a rigorous methodology and new metrics for fair comparison of server and microserver platforms. We deploy our methodology and metrics to compare a microserver with ARM cores against two servers with x86 cores, running the same real-time financial analytics workload. We define workload-specific but platform-independent performance metrics for platform comparison, targeting both datacenter operators and end users. Our methodology establishes that a server based the Xeon Phi processor delivers the highest performance and energy-efficiency. However, by scaling out energy-efficient microservers, we achieve competitive or better energy-efficiency than a power-equivalent server with two Sandy Bridge sockets despite the microserver's slower cores. Using a new iso-QoS (iso-Quality of Service) metric, we find that the ARM microserver scales enough to meet market throughput demand, i.e. a 100% QoS in terms of timely option pricing, with as little as 55% of the energy consumed by the Sandy Bridge server.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2014

A Programming Model and Runtime System for Significance-Aware Energy-Efficient Computing

Reducing energy consumption is one of the key challenges in computing technology. One factor that contributes to high energy consumption is that all parts of the program are considered equally significant for the accuracy of the end-result. However, in many cases, parts of computations can be performed in an approximate way, or even dropped, without affecting the quality of the final output to a significant degree. In this paper, we introduce a task-based programming model and runtime system that exploit this observation to trade off the quality of program outputs for increased energy-efficiency. This is done in a structured and flexible way, allowing for easy exploitation of different execution points in the quality/energy space, without code modifications and without adversely affecting application performance. The programmer specifies the significance of tasks, and optionally provides approximations for them. Moreover, she provides hints to the runtime on the percentage of tasks that should be executed accurately in order to reach the target quality of results. The runtime system can apply a number of different policies to decide whether it will execute each individual less-significant task in its accurate form, or in its approximate version. Policies differ in terms of their runtime overhead but also the degree to which they manage to execute tasks according to the programmer's specification. The results from experiments performed on top of an Intel-based multicore/multiprocessor platform show that, depending on the runtime policy used, our system can achieve an energy reduction of up to 83% compared with a fully accurate execution and up to 35% compared with an approximate version employing loop perforation. At the same time, our approach always results in graceful quality degradation.

cs.PL↗