Patent ID: 8904213

Claim:
A system for managing inactive states of computing devices comprising: a memory, a processor unit in communication with said memory, for performing a method comprising: receiving, at said processor unit, a request to one of: activate or deactivate one or more computing devices from a respective group of inactive or active computing devices, each said inactive or active computing device initially in a pre-determined state of readiness; activating or deactivating said one or more computing devices, said activating or deactivating resulting in a number of computing devices in one or more activation states of readiness i; computing an optimal configuration of said computing devices in said one or more said states of readiness i by minimizing an expected power consumption Σ i A i P i where i represents all inactive computing device states, A i represents a number of said computing devices currently in each state i, and, P i represents an average power consumption of computing devices while in said state i; and placing said computing devices in said optimized configuration, said processor unit is further configured to: formulate an objective function to be minimized, said objective function representing said expected power consumption Σ i A i P i subject to a constraint, wherein, after one of said activating or deactivating one or more computing devices, said processor unit is further configured to: compute activation vector A″ representing a number of computing devices in said optimized one or more activation states of readiness i; specify an upper threshold T max representing a maximum expected time to activate additional computing devices; and compute probabilities p i for i additional computing devices to be needed, where i ranges from 1 to a specified upper threshold, wherein said activation vector A″ is computed by formulating said objective function to minimize an expected power consumption Σ i A″ i P i given a constraint Σ i R i p i <T max , where Σ i R i p i is a weighted sum representing the expected time required to make the i computing devices available.