Energy-efficient real-time heterogeneous cluster scheduling with node replacement due to failures

Energy preservation in computing systems is an important research topic nowadays. Clusters are usually composed of different hardware with different performance and energy consumption. Performance and efficiency are two metrics introduced in this paper that describe servers’ computational power and energy efficiency, respectively. Based on these metrics, we propose three scheduling policies for hard real-time tasks that are executed on a heterogeneous cluster with power-aware dynamic voltage/frequency scaling processors. Simulation experiments show promising results as compared to those of other existing scheduling policies. In order to study the effects of processor failures, the impact of replacing high-performance processors with high-efficiency processors is studied. Furthermore, the load balancing mechanism used in the system is viewed from an energy perspective.