PROPOSAL NUMBER: 0410908/0410896 PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Reiher Peter/Wang An-I INSTITUTION: University of California, Los Angeles and Florida State University PROPOSAL TITLE: Collaborative Research: Conquest-2: Improving Energy Effi-ciency and Performance Through a Disk/RAM Hybrid File System
This project improves energy efficiency and performance for many kinds of com-puters. Portables must be shut down when their battery is exhausted. While large servers do not rely on batteries, their energy consumption is a significant fraction of overall cost. Disk drives incur large energy costs for both types of machines, consuming up to 77% of all energy used by some servers.
The Conquest-2 file system reduces energy consumption by replacing disks with inexpensive RAM for persistent storage of many files. The earlier Conquest filesystem demonstrated impressive speed improvements through this tech-nique. Conquest-2 builds on Conquest to reduce disk power consumption as well. Conquest-2 is being built as a working prototype to demonstrate that it can reduce the energy demands of both individual laptop machines and huge data centers, while achieving speeds better than traditional systems. Files that were previously kept on disk are stored in persistent RAM, saving energy by keeping the disk spinning much less. Since RAM itself consumes power, a re-search challenge for Conquest-2 is to use the persistent RAM in a power-efficient way without compromising the system's speed. Under popular Web server loads, Conquest-2 is expected to save up to 77% of power on servers and achieve up to a 96% increase in file system speed, to be demonstrated by measuring the prototype with realistic workloads. The source code of Con-quest-2 will be available under an open-source license. Conquest-2 will sup-port many different machine types and applications, including databases, web and other on-line servers, and laptops.
Dr. Brett D. Fleisch Program Director, CISE/CNS May 26, 2004. .
