Comparing Power and Energy Efficiency for the Extreme Design Points: Using more resources for traditional
commodity clusters has usually come at a steep increase
in energy and power consumption. Starting with a 32
disk/64 core configuration, if we were to scale the system
to 384 disk/768 core, we would see a significant spike in
power consumption (>1750 W assuming idle disks consume ∼7 W). Figure 12 quantifies the impact of using increased resources in a balanced manner for our system. Figure 12(a) shows that as more resources are used when moving from 32d/64c configuration to 64d/768c configuration,
the improvementin Perf./W varies from 75% to 175%. Similarly, Figure 12(b) shows that the improvement in Perf./Wh for 64d/768c configuration varies from 5.3X to 14.4X
compared to 32d/64c configuration. These savings come
from the ability of the system to provide balanced resource
utilization by virtualizing I/O, and by amortizing fixed costs
like fan and power supplies.