Interference of billing and scheduling strategies for energy and cost savings in modern data centers

Kunkel, J. M., Shoukourian, H., Heidari, R. and Wilde, T. (2019) Interference of billing and scheduling strategies for energy and cost savings in modern data centers. Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems, 23. pp. 49-66. ISSN 2210-5379 doi: 10.1016/j.suscom.2019.04.003

Abstract/Summary

The high energy consumption of HPC systems is an obstacle for evergrowing systems. Unfortunately, energy consumption does not decrease linearly with reduced workload; therefore, energy conservation techniques have been deployed on various levels which steer the overall system. While the overall saving of energy is useful, the price of energy is not necessarily proportional to the consumption. Particularly with renewable energies, there are occasions in which the price is significantly lower. The potential of saving energy costs when using smart contracts with energy providers is lacking research. In this paper, we conduct an analysis of the potential savings when applying cost-aware schedulers to data center workloads while considering power contracts that allow for dynamic (hourly) pricing. The contributions of this paper are twofold: 1) the theoretic assessment of cost savings; 2) the development of a simulator to replay batch scheduler traces which supports flexible energy cost models and various cost-aware scheduling algorithms. This allows to approximate the energy costs savings of data centers for various scenarios including off-peak and hourly budgeted energy prices as provided by the energy spot market. An evaluation is conducted with four annual job traces from the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ).

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/83359
Identification Number/DOI	10.1016/j.suscom.2019.04.003
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Computer Science
Publisher	Elsevier
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