Energy-Efficient Scheduling of HPC Applications in Cloud Computing Environments

TL;DR

This paper proposes near-optimal energy-efficient scheduling policies for HPC applications in cloud data centers, significantly reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions while maintaining profitability.

Contribution

It introduces novel scheduling policies that exploit heterogeneity across data centers considering energy and carbon factors, achieving substantial energy savings.

Findings

Up to 30% energy savings compared to profit-based policies

Reduced carbon emissions through optimized scheduling

Improved profit margins for cloud providers

Abstract

The use of High Performance Computing (HPC) in commercial and consumer IT applications is becoming popular. They need the ability to gain rapid and scalable access to high-end computing capabilities. Cloud computing promises to deliver such a computing infrastructure using data centers so that HPC users can access applications and data from a Cloud anywhere in the world on demand and pay based on what they use. However, the growing demand drastically increases the energy consumption of data centers, which has become a critical issue. High energy consumption not only translates to high energy cost, which will reduce the profit margin of Cloud providers, but also high carbon emissions which is not environmentally sustainable. Hence, energy-efficient solutions are required that can address the high increase in the energy consumption from the perspective of not only Cloud provider but also from the environment. To address this issue we propose near-optimal scheduling policies that exploits heterogeneity across multiple data centers for a Cloud provider. We consider a number of energy efficiency factors such as energy cost, carbon emission rate, workload, and CPU power efficiency which changes across different data center depending on their location, architectural design, and management system. Our carbon/energy based scheduling policies are able to achieve on average up to 30% of energy savings in comparison to profit based scheduling policies leading to higher profit and less carbon emissions.