reMinMin: A novel static energy-centric list scheduling approach based on real measurements

Abstract

Heterogeneous compute nodes in form of CPUs with attached GPU and FPGA accelerators have strongly gained interested in the last years. Applications differ in their execution characteristics and can therefore benefit from such heterogeneous resources in terms of performance or energy consumption. While performance optimization has been the only goal for a long time, nowadays research is more and more focusing on techniques to minimize energy consumption due to rising electricity costs. This paper presents reMinMin, a novel static list scheduling approach for optimizing the total energy consumption for a set of tasks executed on a heterogeneous compute node. reMinMin bases on a new energy model that differentiates between static and dynamic energy components and covers effects of accelerator tasks on the host CPU. The required energy values are retrieved by measurements on the real computing system. In order to evaluate reMinMin, we compare it with two reference implementations on three task sets with different degrees of heterogeneity. In our experiments, MinMin is consistently better than a scheduler optimizing for dynamic energy only, which requires up to 19.43% more energy, and very close to optimal schedules.