A Measurement-Based Analysis of Temperature Variations Introduced by Power Management on Commodity Hardware

Commodity HardWare (CHW) is currently used in the Internet to deploy large data centers or small computing nodes. Moreover, CHW will be also used to deploy future telecommunication networks, thanks to the adoption of the forthcoming network softwarization paradigm. In this context, CHW machines can be put in Active Mode (AM) or in Sleep Mode (SM) several times per day, based on the traffic requirements from users. However, the transitions between the power states may introduce fatigue effects, which may increase the CHW maintenance costs. In this paper, we perform a measurement campaign of a CHW machine subject to power state changes introduced by SM. Our results show that the temperature change due to power state transitions is not negligible, and that the abrupt stopping of the fans on hot components (such as the CPU) tends to spread the heat over the other components of the CHW machine. In addition, we also show that the CHW failure rate is reduced by a factor of 5 when the number of transitions between AM and SM states is more than 20 per day and the SM duration is around 800 [s].