A Data Center Demand Response Policy for Real-World Workload Scenarios in HPC
Yijia Zhanga, Daniel C. Wilsonb, Ioannis Ch. Paschalidisc and Ayse K. Coskund
Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
azhangyj@bu.edu
bdanielcw@bu.edu
cyannisp@bu.edu
dacoskun@bu.edu
ABSTRACT
Demand response programs offer an opportunity for large power consumers to save on electricity costs by modulating their power consumption in response to demand changes in the electricity grid. Multiple types of such programs exist; for example, regulation service programs enable a consumer to bid for a sustainable amount of power draw over a time period, along with a reserve amount they are able to provide at request of the electricity service provider. Data centers offer unique capabilities to participate in these programs since they have significant capacity to modify their power consumption through workload scheduling and CPU power limiting. This paper proposes a novel power management policy and a bidding policy that enable data centers to participate in regulation service programs under real-world constraints. The power management policy schedules computing jobs and applies server power-capping under both the constraints of power programs and the constraints of job Qualityof-Service (QoS). Simulations with workload traces from a real data center show that the proposed policies enable data centers to meet both the requirement of regulation service programs and the QoS requirement of jobs. We demonstrate that, by applying our policies, data centers can save their electricity costs by 10% while abiding by all the QoS constraints in a real-world scenario.
Keywords: HPC, Demand Response, Quality Of Service.
