Energy-aware job scheduler for high-performance computing

In recent years energy-aware computing has become a major topic, not only in wireless and mobile devices but also in devices using wired technology. The ICT industry is consuming an increasing amount of energy and a large part of the consumption is generated by large-scale data centers. In High-Performance Computing (HPC) data centers, higher performance equals higher energy consumption. This has created incentives on exploring several alternatives to reduce the energy consumption of the system, such as energy-efficient hardware or the Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) technique. This work presents an energy-aware scheduler that can be applied to a HPC data center without any changes in hardware. The scheduler is evaluated with a simulation model and a real-world HPC testbed. Our experiments indicate that the scheduler is able to reduce the energy consumption by 6–16% depending on the job workload. More importantly, there is no significant slowdown in the turnaround time or increase in the wait time of the job. The results hereby evidence that our approach can be beneficial for HPC data center operators without a large penalty on service level agreements.