Towards green data centers: A comparison of x86 and ARM architectures power efficiency

Servers and clusters are fundamental building blocks of high performance computing systems and the IT infrastructure of many companies and institutions. This paper analyzes the feasibility of building servers based on low power computers through an experimental comparison of server applications runn...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of parallel and distributed computing Vol. 72; no. 12; pp. 1770 - 1780
Main Authors Aroca, Rafael Vidal, Gonçalves, Luiz Marcos Garcia
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier Inc 01.12.2012
Subjects
Cluster
Energy efficiency
Low power
Performance evaluation
Power usage
Performance evaluation
Power usage
Cluster
Energy efficiency
Low power
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Summary:Servers and clusters are fundamental building blocks of high performance computing systems and the IT infrastructure of many companies and institutions. This paper analyzes the feasibility of building servers based on low power computers through an experimental comparison of server applications running on x86 and ARM computer architectures. The comparison executed on web and database servers includes power usage, CPU load, temperature, request latencies and the number of requests handled by each tested system. Floating point performance and power usage are also evaluated. The use of ARM based systems has shown to be a good choice when power efficiency is needed without losing performance. ► We evaluate performance and power efficiency of x86 and ARM architectures. ► We present an experimental setup that can be easily replicated with low cost. ► Key differences of ARM and x86 processors are presented and discussed. ► ARM systems are more power efficient for SQL and static HTTP servers. ► x86 architecture is still more power efficient for floating point computation.
ISSN:0743-7315
1096-0848
DOI:10.1016/j.jpdc.2012.08.005