How to Make Profit: Exploiting Fluctuating Electricity Prices with Albatross, A Runtime System for Heterogeneous HPC Clusters

Abstract

The ongoing evolution of the power grid towards a highly dynamic supply system poses challenges as renewables induce new grid characteristics. The volatility of electricity sources leads to a fluctuating electricity price, which even becomes negative when excess supply occurs. Operators of high-performance--computing (HPC) clusters therefore can consider the highly dynamic variations of electricity prices to provide an energy-efficient and economic operation. This paper presents Albatross, a runtime system for heterogeneous HPC clusters. To ensure an energy-efficient and economic processing of HPC workloads, our system exploits heterogeneity at the hardware level and considers dynamic electricity prices. We have implemented Albatross and evaluate it on a heterogeneous HPC cluster in our lab to show how the power demand of the cluster decreases when electricity prices are high (i.e., excess demand at the grid). When electricity prices are low or negative (i.e., excess supply to the grid), Albatross purposefully increases the workload and, thus, power demand of the HPC cluster---to make profit.