
Computational Sprinting has proven to be an effective way to boost the computing performance for bursty workloads, which allows a chip to exceed its power and thermal limits temporarily by turning on all processor cores and absorbing the extra heat dissipation with certain phase-changing materials. However, extra power available for sprinting is constrained by existing power distribution infrastructures. Using batteries alone to provide the additional power to achieve performance target not only limits the effectiveness of sprinting, but also negatively impacts the lifetime of the batteries. Leveraging renewable power supply in a green data center provides an opportunity to exploit the maximal potential of Computational Sprinting. However, the intermittent nature of renewable energy makes it very challenging. In this paper, we propose GreenSprint, a renewable energy driven approach that enables a data center to boost its computing performance efficiently by conducting computational sprinting. We present four sprinting strategies to address the challenge imposed by the intermittent and time-varying nature of renewable energy supply. We build an experimental prototype to evaluate GreenSprint on a cluster of 10 servers with a simulated solar power generator. The results show that renewable energy by itself can sustain different duration lengths of sprinting when its supply is sufficient and can improve performance by up to 4.8x for representative interactive applications. We also show the effectiveness of core-count and frequency scaling in the presence of varied renewable power and limited battery energy.
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 5 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Average | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% |
