Energy--Performance Trade-Offs via the EP Queue

Abstract

We introduce the EP queue -- a significant generalization of the M B / G /1 queue that has state-dependent service time probability distributions and incorporates power-up for first arrivals and power-down for idle periods. We derive exact results for the busy-time and response-time distributions. From these, we derive power consumption metrics during nonidle periods and overall response time metrics, which together provide a single measure of the trade-off between energy and performance. We illustrate these trade-offs for some policies and show how numerical results can provide insights into system behavior. The EP queue has application to storage systems, especially hard disks, and other data-center components such as compute servers, networking, and even hyperconverged infrastructure.