Optimizing energy consumption with task consolidation in clouds

Task consolidation is a way to maximize utilization of cloud computing resources. Maximizing resource utilization provides various benefits such as the rationalization of maintenance, IT service customization, and QoS and reliable services. However, maximizing resource utilization does not mean efficient energy use. Much of the literature shows that energy consumption and resource utilization in clouds are highly coupled. Consequently, some of the literature aims to decrease resource utilization in order to save energy, while others try to reach a balance between resource utilization and energy consumption. In this paper, we present an energy-aware task consolidation (ETC) technique that minimizes energy consumption. ETC achieves this by restricting CPU use below a specified peak threshold. ETC does this by consolidating tasks amongst virtual clusters. In addition, the energy cost model considers network latency when a task migrates to another virtual cluster. To evaluate the performance of ETC we compare it against MaxUtil. MaxUtil is a recently developed greedy algorithm that aims to maximize cloud computing resources. The simulation results show that ETC can significantly reduce power consumption in a cloud system, with 17% improvement over MaxUtil. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.