Towards Energy Budget Control in HPC

Energy consumption has become one of the most critical issues in the evolution of High Performance Computing systems (HPC). Controlling the energy consumption of HPC platforms is not only a way to control the cost but also a step forward on the road towards exaflops. Powercapping is a widely studied technique that guarantees that the platform will not exceed a certain power threshold instantaneously but it gives no flexibility to adapt job scheduling to a longer term energy budget control. We propose a job scheduling mechanism that extends the backfilling algorithm to become energy-aware. Simultaneously, we adapt resource management with a node shutdown technique to minimize energy consumption whenever needed. This combination enables an efficient energy consumption budget control on a cluster during a period of time. The technique is experimented, validated and compared with various alternatives through extensive simulations. Experimentation results show high system utilization and limited bounded slowdown along with interesting outcomes in energy efficiency while respecting an energy budget during a particular time period.