A Study on the Energetic Viability of Single Board Computers for Cloud Computing Scenarios

Abstract

Abstract-The following document explores the viability of the usage of consumer-grade, ARM-based single board computers as a power saving alternative to the traditional monolithic x64-full-server based approach. By taking advantage of several capabilities provided by such devices, such as low cost, low power consumption and low on-time, the authors finally propose a scalable, energy-efficient, ARMbased cloud infrastructure. To that end, we start analyzing the current offerings in terms of capabilities, net cost, processing power and power consumption, comparing them with the relevant server-oriented offerings. We subsequently explore the adequacy of several metrics to model on-budget raw data processing, considering full-system wattage under nominal usage conditions. The low initial investment and long-term affordability of this approach results in quite a relevant case of application to Edge Cloud computing scenarios.