Title: Reducing energy consumption in distributed computing through economic resource allocation

Authors: Timothy M. Lynar; Simon; Ric D. Herbert; William J. Chivers

Addresses: Faculty of Science and Information Technology, School of Design, Communication and Information Technology, The University of Newcastle, P.O. Box 127, Ourimbah, NSW 2258, Australia ' Faculty of Science and Information Technology, School of Design, Communication and Information Technology, The University of Newcastle, P.O. Box 127, Ourimbah, NSW 2258, Australia ' Faculty of Science and Information Technology, School of Design, Communication and Information Technology, The University of Newcastle, P.O. Box 127, Ourimbah, NSW 2258, Australia ' Faculty of Science and Information Technology, School of Design, Communication and Information Technology, The University of Newcastle, P.O. Box 127, Ourimbah, NSW 2258, Australia

Abstract: Energy consumption is an increasingly important consideration in computing. High-performance computing environments consume substantial amounts of energy and the cost of energy is increasing. We explore the possibility of reducing the energy consumption of a grid of heterogeneous computers through appropriate resource allocation strategies. We examine a number of possible grid workload scenarios and analyse the impact of different resource allocation mechanisms on energy consumption and time taken to execute tasks. We perform this analysis first on a cluster of heterogeneous nodes and then scale up the experiment to a grid of multiple clusters. Our results show that different resource allocation mechanisms perform better under different scenarios, and that selection of the resource allocation mechanism can significantly alter grid energy consumption.

Keywords: grid computing; resource allocation; auction; energy consumption; energy conservation; green ICT; high performance computing; distributed computing; energy efficiency.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGUC.2013.057117

International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing, 2013 Vol.4 No.4, pp.231 - 241

Received: 18 Apr 2012
Accepted: 24 Aug 2012
Published online: 18 Sep 2014 *

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