Fractal Treeâ„¢ indexes are green. They have the potential to be greener still. Here’s why:
Remarkably, data centers consume 1-3 percent of all the US electricity. A majority of this power is used to drive servers and storage systems. Significant energy savings remain on the table.
Here’s why Fractal Tree indexing enables more energy-efficient storage: Data centers typically use many small-capacity disks rather than a few large-capacity disks. Why? One reason is to harness more spindles to obtain more I/Os per second. In some high-performance applications, users go so far as to employ techniques such as “short stroking” to get more performance (and less storage) out of drives. But Fractal Tree indexes are so I/O-efficient that they don’t need as many I/Os.
Consider the power consumption of disks. An enterprise 80 to 160 GB disk runs at something like 4W (idle power), while an enterprise 1-2 TB disk runs at something like 8W (idle power). If you replace many small-capacity disks by a small number of large-capacity disks, you can maintain the same capacity, but reduce your storage power consumption per GB by close to an order of magnitude. So Fractal Tree indexes enable energy-efficient hardware when the metric is Watts per GB.
For a databases, however, joules per DB operation may be a better metric. Fractal Tree indexes are so I/O efficient, that they are terrific when measured as Joules per operation.
What about power consumed by servers? A lot of our customers see an increase in server activity due to the increase in throughput. Fractal Tree indexes are so I/O-efficient that they drive CPUs harder, consequently using more power. But, assuming that a user is trying to keep the same overall target number of inserts/deletes, Fractal Tree indexes are still more efficient in terms of joules per database insert/delete.
Given how important these topics are, Bradley and I recently attended the National Science Foundation workshop “Energy-Efficient Data Management” in Arlington, VA. This was a two-day planning meeting, where researchers from industry and academia convened to discuss open problems in energy-efficient data management. We discussed how to devise and deploy new data-management methods and new data-intensive applications that are more energy efficient.
I spoke about how better data structures have the potential to deliver energy savings. For details, see the slides themselves: “How Fast Indexing Makes Databases Greener.”
The main purpose of the talk was to discuss open areas for research. Here are three open problems I covered in my talk. For more details see the slides.
Thanks again to the NSF for supporting Tokutek through SBIR grants on topics like these.
Be green is very ‘smart’ now 😀