Accuracy of Energy Model Calibration with IPMI

Energy consumption in Cloud computing is a significant issue and affects aspects such as the cost of energy, cooling in the data center and the environmental impact of cloud data centers. Monitoring and prediction provides the groundwork for improving the energy efficiency of data centers. This monitoring however is required to be fast and efficient without unnecessary overhead. It is also required to scale to the size of a data center where measurement through directly attached Watt meters is unrealistic. This therefore requires models that translate resource utilisation into the power consumed by a physical host. These models require calibrating and are hence subject to error. We discuss the causes of error within these models, focusing upon the use of IPMI in order to gather this data. We make recommendations on ways to mitigate this error without overly complicating the underlying model. The final result of these models is a Watt meter emulator that can provide values for power consumption from hosts in the data center, with an average error of 0.20W.