Thermal-Efficiency Benchmark on High-Performance Clusters

The energy efficiency of a data center depends on the cooling cost of clusters in the data center. Enhancing thermal efficiency of clusters is a practical approach to reducing energy consumption cost, optimizing scalability, and improving reliability. In this paper, we propose ThermoBench to evaluate the thermal efficiency of computing and storage clusters deployed in data centers. We shed light on the criteria and challenges of developing a thermal efficiency benchmark. We pay particular attention on clusters running scalable client-server enterprise applications in data centers. We characterize workload conditions in such a cluster computing environment in forms of client sessions of multiple requests. To resemble real-world applications, ThermoBench makes use of the TPCW benchmark to changes transaction mix and load over time. We apply ThermoBench to evaluate the thermal efficiency of a real-world cluster. Experimental results show that ThermalBench provides a simple yet powerful benchmark solution for assessing thermal behaviors of computing clusters in data centers.