The Impact of Process Competition on Energy Consumption: Analysis and Modeling

With the development of distributed systems, the need to manage the sharing of machines among multiple concurrent users has arisen. In the cloud computing context, the simultaneous instantiation of virtual machines and containers by different users on the same infrastructure leads to contention for physical computational resources. In this regard, this paper analyses a process’s energy consumption as a function of the competition for computational resources it encounters. Investigating this behavior is fundamental to many applications, including pricing in cloud computing services and task scheduling and load balancing, while improving energy efficiency. To determine this behavior, experiments were conducted, yielding a dependence on the number of processor cores on the physical machine hosting the process. As the number of cores increases, the process’s energy consumption as a function of the competition it faces transitions from linear to a root function.