Save 30% Power Consumption Without Performance Degradation in Data Centers

Professor Kim Daehoon’s DGIST Team Develops New Memory Power Management Technology

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[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Bong-su] A technology that can reduce the power consumption of data centers, whose operation rates have rapidly increased in the non-face-to-face society, by up to 30% or more has been developed.

The Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) announced on the 4th that Professor Kim Dae-hoon’s team from the Department of Information and Communication Convergence has developed a new memory power management technology called ‘GreenDIMM’ that effectively reduces standby power consumption caused by unused memory in data center servers. This technology is expected to show a revolutionary power-saving effect by reducing DRAM power consumption by up to 55% and the entire system power consumption by up to 30% compared to existing technologies.

Data centers provide essential information for online businesses and store customer and corporate information. Because they consume a large amount of electricity and must operate continuously, their power consumption is very high. However, the average memory usage of large-scale data centers is only 40-60%. If the standby power of nearly half of the unused memory is minimized, the energy consumption of data centers can be greatly improved.

Existing memory power management technologies reduce standby power consumption of unused memory by switching the unused rank-level memory areas to low-power states through the memory controller. However, due to memory interleaving technology, which requests multiple ranks almost simultaneously to maximize memory performance, all ranks are always maintained in a high-power state, resulting in very low practicality of existing technologies.

Previous studies proposed various technologies to improve this by disabling memory interleaving technology and switching as many ranks as possible to low-power states. Although these methods effectively reduced DRAM standby power consumption, they had the limitation of causing significant performance degradation during memory-intensive workload execution because memory interleaving technology was not supported.

The research team focused on developing a new technology that can reduce standby power consumption of unused memory while not impairing the simultaneous multiple memory request function of memory interleaving. Professor Kim’s team integrated the operating system’s memory online/offline technology, which manages memory blocks in the physical address space in real time, into memory power management, and devised a method to apply low-power states at a more granular subarray level than the rank level. This development of GreenDIMM preserves the effect of memory interleaving while drastically reducing standby power consumption of unused memory.

Professor Kim Dae-hoon said, “Through this research, we introduced a technology that effectively reduces standby power consumption of unused memory while preserving the memory performance improvement effect of memory interleaving technology,” and added, “We will continue to devote ourselves to research so that this technology can further revolutionize energy consumption in large-scale data center server environments in the future.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.