Energy aware consolidation for cloud computing

Consolidation of applications in cloud computing envi-ronments presents a significant opportunity for energy optimization. As a first step toward enabling energy effi-cient consolidation, we study the inter-relationships be-tween energy consumption, resource utilization, and per-formance of consolidated workloads. The study reveals the energy performance trade-offs for consolidation and shows that optimal operating points exist. We model the consolidation problem as a modified bin packing prob-lem and illustrate it with an example. Finally, we outline the challenges in finding effective solutions to the con-solidation problem. 1