CANBERRA, July 5 (Xinhua) -- A team of Australian computer scientists have developed a new technique for computer operating systems, which could boost the efficiency of large data centers by 25 percent.
Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, and U.S. technology giant Microsoft, teamed up to implement the system which would see the computer's operating system share its processing power, a mechanism which would lead to a substantial upgrade in energy efficiency for servers that run searches and interact with users.
Professor Steve Blackburn from ANU Research School of Computer Science said the sharing of the computer's processing power which refers to the ability of a computer to manipulate data would activate the improved efficiency.
"Computer servers spend a lot of time waiting around for search requests to come in. By sneaking in other processes while they are waiting, we can use the computers more efficiently," Blackburn said in an ANU media release on Tuesday.
Blackburn said the improvement in efficiency was inspired by the fairy tale of the Elves and the Shoemaker.
"It's just like the elves that used the shoemaker's tools at night in the Brothers Grimm fairy tale."
Microsoft, Google and Facebook, which provide huge Internet services, attribute a lot of their success to the speed of searches and other web services that interact with users. A delay as small as a hundredth of a second will mean lost revenue for companies.
Xi Yang, a PhD student at the ANU Research School of Computer Science who collaborated on the study, explained the inefficient process computer servers go through.
"The companies have no control of when users will request a search, so they have large server capacity that is mostly idle," Yang said on Tuesday.
The team were able to work out a way for processes that are not time critical to use the operating system while it is idle, and to quickly step out of the way when search requests come in.
"The techniques are extremely easy to implement on current hardware. In some cases that we studied, the new techniques made a server nine times more efficient," he said.
A key to implementing the new development into the operating system was analyzing server and application performance in great detail.
"We have analyzed the operating system's performance 100 times more closely than before, which is crucial, because much of the activity that occurs inside a computer happens at very high frequencies," Yang said.
Dr Kathryn McKinley, a researcher with Microsoft, said the improvement has a greater impact than just a faster internet search.
"This work has the potential for enormous impact in data centers-it could save over 25 percent of the data centre energy bill for these companies, a huge win," McKinley said on Tuesday.
"With our new fine-grain control hardware control, we can substantially improve the efficiency of data center servers while achieving the same responsiveness."
