Power capping in high performance computing systems

Power consumption is a key factor in modern ICT infrastructure, especially in the expanding world of High Performance Computing, Cloud Computing and Big Data. Such consumption is bound to become an even greater issue as supercomputers are envisioned to enter the Exascale by 2020, granted that they obtain an order of magnitude energy efficiency gain. An important component in many strategies devised to decrease energy usage is “power capping”, i.e., the possibility to constrain the system power consumption within certain power budget. In this paper we propose two novel approaches for power capped workload dispatching and we demonstrate them on a real-life high-performance machine: the Eurora supercomputer hosted at CINECA computing center in Bologna. Power capping is a feature not included in the commercial Portable Batch System (PBS) dispatcher currently in use on Eurora. The first method is based on a heuristic technique while the second one relies on a hybrid strategy which combines a CP and a heuristic approach. Both systems are evaluated and compared on simulated job traces.