Towards Energy-Efficient Database Cluster Design

• Main Authors: Lang, Willis, Harizopoulos, Stavros, Patel, Jignesh M, Shah, Mehul A, Tsirogiannis, Dimitris
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 09.08.2012
• Subjects: Computer Science - Databases
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1208.1933

Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), Vol. 5, No. 11, pp. 1684-1695 (2012) Energy is a growing component of the operational cost for many "big data" deployments, and hence has become increasingly important for practitioners of large-scale data analysis who require scale-out clusters or parallel DBMS appliances. Although a number of recent studies have investigated the energy efficiency of DBMSs, none of these studies have looked at the architectural design space of energy-efficient parallel DBMS clusters. There are many challenges to increasing the energy efficiency of a DBMS cluster, including dealing with the inherent scaling inefficiency of parallel data processing, and choosing the appropriate energy-efficient hardware. In this paper, we experimentally examine and analyze a number of key parameters related to these challenges for designing energy-efficient database clusters. We explore the cluster design space using empirical results and propose a model that considers the key bottlenecks to energy efficiency in a parallel DBMS. This paper represents a key first step in designing energy-efficient database clusters, which is increasingly important given the trend toward parallel database appliances.