Pricing schemes for energy-efficient HPC systems: Design and exploration

Energy efficiency is of paramount importance for the sustainability of high performance computing (HPC) systems. Energy consumption limits the peak performance of supercomputers and accounts for a large share of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Consequently, system owners and final users have started exploring mechanisms to trade off performance for power consumption, for example, through frequency and voltage scaling. However, only a limited number of studies have been devoted to explore the economic viability of performance scaling solutions and to devise pricing mechanisms fostering a more energy-conscious usage of resources, without adversely impacting return-of-investment on the HPC facility. How to foster green-computing to take advantage of power management knobs? Would today’s accounting systems be sufficient or are novel pricing schemes needed? How to model the link between TCO and power management? To answer these questions, we present a parametrized model to analyze the impact of frequency scaling on energy consumption and to assess the potential cost benefits for the HPC facility and users. We evaluate four pricing schemes, considering both facility manager and the user perspectives. We then perform a design space exploration considering current and near-future HPC systems and technologies.