Benchmarking The Energy Efficiency of Servers

The energy usage of servers and mass storage is a high-priority issue for the IT industry, vendors and environmental agencies. In order to improve the energy efficiency during information processing and storage, power consumption of hardware must be measured effectively and precisely. At the same time, power consumption has to be set in relation to the considered server workloads to ensure fair and repeatable results.

In this talk, we present the work on energy benchmarking that is carried out in the context of the SPEC Power and Performance Committee. We discuss the selection of metrics, the design of the SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark and challenges addressed during its development. We also highlight the interaction between academia and industry in the scope of SPEC.