This is a very exciting development in terms of directly measuring the carbon savings of virtualization or moving to a cloud.
http://bit.ly/9011MX
Joulemeter: VM, Server, Client, and Software Energy Usage
Joulemeter is a software based mechanism to measure the energy usage of virtual machines (VMs), servers, desktops, laptops, and even individual softwares running on a computer.
Joulemeter estimates the energy usage of a VM, computer, or software by measuring the hardware resources (CPU, disk, memory, screen etc) being used and converting the resource usage to actual power usage based on automatically learned realistic power models.
Joulemeter can be used for gaining visibility into energy use and for making several power management and provisioning decisions in data centers, client computing, and software design.
For more technical details on the system here is their paper.
Virtual Machine Power Metering and Provisioning
Aman Kansal, Feng
Zhao, Jie Liu
Microsoft Research
Nupur Kothari
University of Southern
California
Arka Bhattacharya
IIT Kharagpur
ABSTRACT
Virtualization is often used in cloud computing platforms for its
several advantages in efficient management of the physical resources.
However, virtualization raises certain additional challenges, and
one of them is lack of power metering for virtual machines (VMs).
Power management requirements in modern data centers have led
to most new servers providing power usage measurement in hardware
and alternate solutions exist for older servers using circuit and
outlet level measurements. However, VM power cannot be measured
purely in hardware. We present a solution for VM power metering.
We build power models to infer power consumption from resource
usage at runtime and identify the challenges that arise when
applying such models for VM power metering. We show how existing
instrumentation in server hardware and hypervisors can be
used to build the required power models on real platforms with low
error. The entire metering approach is designed to operate with
extremely low runtime overhead while providing practically useful
accuracy. We illustrate the use of the proposed metering capability
for VM power capping, leading to significant savings in power provisioning
costs that constitute a large fraction of data center power
costs. Experiments are performed on server traces from several
thousand production servers, hosting Microsoft’s real-world applications
such as Windows Live Messenger. The results show that
not only does VM power metering allows reclaiming the savings
that were earlier achieved using physical server power capping, but
also that it enables further savings in provisioning costs with virtualization.
Note there will be a desktop and laptop version available soon.
Download: A freely downloadable version of the Joulemeter software that measures laptop and desktop energy usage will be be available in a few weeks. Watch this space!
This blog is about using ICTs to develop climate change preparedness solutions built around Energy Internet and autonomous eVehicles
Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview
Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.
Using autonomous eVehicles for Renewable Energy Transportation and Distribution: http://goo.gl/bXO6x and http://goo.gl/UDz37
Free High Speed Internet to the Home or School Integrated with solar roof top: http://goo.gl/wGjVG
High level architecture of Internet Networks to survive Climate Change: https://goo.gl/24SiUP
Architecture and routing protocols for Energy Internet: http://goo.gl/niWy1g
How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd