Linux Power Management - Challenges in Modern Servers and how SmartNICs can help

Servers are inherently demand driven and request rates can experience long- and short-term fluctuations. Modern operating systems such as Linux perform power management in the form of Dynamic Voltage/Frequency Scaling (DVFS) based on recent thread activity, some CPUs also support autonomous DVFS control based on processor utilization. This talk will provide a background on the hardware aspects of DVFS and the interaction with Linux power governors, illustrate challenges of DVFS management in request-driven networking applications and explore potential improvements using the help of SmartNICs.      «

Servers are inherently demand driven and request rates can experience long- and short-term fluctuations. Modern operating systems such as Linux perform power management in the form of Dynamic Voltage/Frequency Scaling (DVFS) based on recent thread activity, some CPUs also support autonomous DVFS control based on processor utilization. This talk will provide a background on the hardware aspects of DVFS and the interaction with Linux power governors, illustrate challenges of DVFS management in...     »