The Impact of Process Competition on Energy Consumption: Analysis and Modeling

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how process energy consumption in cloud systems depends on resource competition and core count, revealing a transition from linear to root function behavior as cores increase.

Contribution

It introduces a model describing the relationship between energy consumption, resource competition, and core count in distributed systems.

Findings

Energy consumption depends on competition for resources.

Transition from linear to root function as core count increases.

Experiments confirm the dependency on processor cores.

Abstract

With the development of distributed systems, the need to manage the sharing of machines among multiple simultaneous users arises. In the cloud computing context, the instantiation of virtual machines and containers by different users utilizing the same infrastructure leads to a dispute for physical computational resources. In this regard, this paper analyses a process's energy consumption as a function of the competition for computational resources it encounters. Investigating this behavior is fundamental for many applications, such as pricing in cloud computing services, and for task scheduling and load balancing, while increasing energy efficiency. To determine this behavior, experiments were conducted and resulted in a dependency on the number of processor cores of the physical machine hosting the process. As the number of cores increases, the process's energy consumption as a function of the competition it faces transitions from linear to a root function.