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Computer Science @ Rochester
Friday, April 01, 2011
2:00 PM
Computer Studies Bldg. Room 703
Amal Fahad
University of Rochester
A Low-Power Active Gateway for Web Services
Internet-based applications become widespread nowadays due to several reasons, such as data availability, work offloading from power-hungry devices, and content transformation for special-need devices. These applications usually run in a server/client model where the server side is hosted on a dedicated machine and responds to clients' requests. In order to avoid the network-condition effects on these applications' performance and to guarantee their high performance, the server side usually runs on multiple machines that consume high power, a few hundred of Watts each.

In this work we evaluate the feasibility and performance of a low-power (a few Watts), wireless active gateway in servicing concurrent client requests of realistic web applications. Results show that the I/O-intensive Squid web caching can be well-supported on the low-power platform, with comparable performance and an order of magnitude better energy efficiency compared to Squid running on a conventional machine. On the other hand, we find that a computation-intensive service supporting enhanced human-computer interaction may lead to excessively long delays when hosted solely on our low-power active gateway. We further propose and evaluate an adaptive offloading technique to manage the computation load.

This work contributes to significant energy saving in the Internet-based information technology and consequently improves the sustainability of computing.