Holistic Approaches to HPC Power and Workflow Management*

Abstract

Constraints on power consumption are having per-vasive effects on high-performance computing (HPC) systems, the facilities in which they are housed, and the application codes themselves. These constraints are driven by a variety of reasons including physical limits on available power within a facility, or are due to utility demand response etc. It is essential that power management must now be added to the traditional HPC goals of monitoring and optimizing application and algorithm correctness, scalability, and performance. Irrespective of the causes for these constraints, a holistic approach must be taken to effectively manage power or schedule jobs more optimally so data centers can remain below these power constraints. In this paper we propose results of implementing several strategies for throttling power and its impact on application performance while providing insights for managing overall system energy levels.