Economic Viability of Hardware Overprovisioning in Power-Constrained High Performance Computing

Abstract

Recent research has established that hardware overprovisioning can improve system power utilization as well as job throughput in power-constrained, high-performance computing environments significantly. These benefits, however, may be associated with an additional infrastructure cost, making hardware overprovisioned systems less viable economically. It is thus important to conduct a detailed cost-benefit analysis before investing in such systems at a large-scale. In this paper, we develop a model to conduct this analysis and show that for a given, fixed infrastructure cost budget and a system power budget, it is possible for hardware overprovisioned systems to lead to a net performance benefit when compared to traditional, worst-case provisioned HPC systems.