On the Impact of Energy-Efficient Strategies in HPC Clusters

• Published in: 2015 23rd Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing pp. 17 - 21
• Main Authors: Rossi, Fabio D., Xavier, Miguel G., Monti, Yuri J., De Rose, Cesar A. F.
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.03.2015
• Subjects: Clusters; Computer simulation; Conferences; Context; Energy consumption; Energy-aware management; Hardware; HPC cluster; Measurement; Networks; performance evaluation; power consumption; Power demand; Processor scheduling; Resource scheduling; Sleep; sleep states; Strategy; Tradeoffs; Turning
• ISSN: 1066-6192; 2377-5750
• DOI: 10.1109/PDP.2015.122

Energy-aware management strategies are a recent trend towards achieving energy-efficient computing in HPC clusters. One of the approaches behind those strategies is to apply energy-saving states on idle nodes, alternating them among different sleep states that reflect on many power consumption levels. This paper investigated the way such energy-efficient strategies affected the job turnaround time - the elapsed time between when the job is submitted and when the job is completed, including the wait time as well as the job's actual execution time - in these clusters. Based on the results we proposed a Best-Fit Energy-Aware Strategy that switches the nodes to a sleep state, depending on the throughput of the resource manager's job queue. We simulated the proposed strategy using the SimGrid simulator. Our preliminary results showed a reduction of up to 19% in the overall energy consumption and give us a better understanding of the trade-offs involved in using energy-efficient strategies.