Efficient and scalable computation of the energy and makespan Pareto front for heterogeneous computing systems
Kyle M. Tarplee, Ryan D. Friese, Anthony A. Maciejewski, Howard Jay Siegel · 2013
The rising costs and demand of electricity for high-performance computing systems pose difficult challenges to system administrators that are trying to simultaneously reduce operating costs and offer state-of-the-art performance. However, system performance and energy consumption are often conflicting objectives. Algorithms are necessary to help system administrators gain insight into this energy/performance tradeoff. Through the use of intelligent resource allocation techniques, system administrators can examine this tradeoff space to quantify how much a given performance level will cost in electricity, or see what kind of performance can be expected when given an energy budget. A novel algorithm is presented that efficiently computes tight lower bounds and high quality solutions for energy and makespan. These solutions are used to bound the Pareto front to easily trade-off energy and performance. These new algorithms are shown to be highly scalable in terms of solution quality and computation time compared to existing algorithms.