In recent years, power and thermal management has become one of the most important issues for cloud-scale data centers that are rapidly increasing the number of hosted servers. In addition to reducing operating costs, precisely controlling power consumption and heat dissipation is an essential way to avoid system failures caused by power capacity overload or overheating due to increasingly high server density (e.g., blade servers). Power and thermal control becomes even more challenging as many data centers start to adopt virtualization technology for resource sharing, leading to increased utilization and power consumption for each server.

In this talk, we will present a coordinated power, thermal, and performance management framework designed for today's virtualized data centers. Our framework first provides highly scalable power control solutions in a hierarchical way at three levels: single server, server rack, and entire data center, because there are physical and contractual power limits at each level. Our framework also includes novel performance control algorithms, which provide power-efficient application-level performance guarantees for multiple virtual machines running on the same physical servers. Furthermore, our framework coordinates power and performance control schemes at different system layers to achieve simultaneous guarantees on both power and performance in virtualized data centers. We will also introduce our work on power management for chip multiprocessors, optimal sensor placement for thermal monitoring, and electricity cost control for distributed data centers.

Dr. Xiaorui Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis in 2006. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2009, the Chancellor's Award for Professional Promise and the College of Engineering Research Fellow Award from the University of Tennessee, the Power-Aware Computing Award from Microsoft Research in 2008, and the IBM Real-Time Innovation Award in 2007. He also received the Best Paper Award from the 29th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS) in 2008. Dr. Wang is an author or coauthor of more than 50 refereed publications in premier journals and conferences. His research interests include power-aware computer systems, real-time embedded systems, and cyber-physical systems.