Modeling and Estimation of LPAR Energy Consumption for IBM POWER9 Systems

Abstract

Sustainable computing is gaining priority for data centers due to need for mandatory compliance with carbon emission reporting regulations. Hence, accurately estimating the energy consumption of servers in data centers has become quintessential. Apart from estimating carbon emissions at the server level, quantifying carbon emissions at the virtualization layer is also crucial because it provides a more precise and detailed understanding of the possible hotspots and mismatched utilization which can help in taking remedial actions. In this paper, we take a first step towards modeling energy consumption at the Logical PARtitions (LPARs) level of data centers driven by IBM POWER9 Systems. We experimentally validate our approach on utilization metrics from the data center of the CIO office of IBM and compare it with the instrumented energy measurements wherein we demonstrate on average 90-95% prediction accuracy for our model.