A simulator to assess energy saving strategies and policies in HPC workloads

Abstract

In recent years power consumption of high performance computing (HPC) clusters has become a growing problem due, e.g., to the economic cost of electricity, the emission of car- bon dioxide (with negative impact on the environment), and the generation of heat (which reduces hardware reliability). In past work, we developed EnergySaving cluster , a software package that regulates the number of active nodes in an HPC facility to match the users’ demands. In this paper, we extend this work by presenting a simulator for this tool that allows the evaluation and analysis of the benefits of applying different energy-saving strategies and policies, under realistic workloads, to different cluster configurations.