Energy efficient real-time task scheduling on CPU-GPU hybrid clusters

Conserving the energy consumption of large data centers is of critical significance, where a few percent in consumption reduction translates into millions-dollar savings. This work studies energy conservation on emerging CPU-GPU hybrid clusters through dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). We aim at minimizing the total energy consumption of processing a sequence of real-time tasks under deadline constraints. We compute the appropriate voltage/frequency setting for each task through mathematical optimization, and assign multiple tasks to the cluster with heuristic scheduling algorithms. In performance evaluation driven by real-world power measurement traces, our scheduling algorithm shows comparable energy savings to the theoretical upper bound. With a GPU scaling interval where analytically at most 38% of energy can be saved, we record 30-36% of energy savings. Our results are applicable to energy management on modern heterogeneous clusters. In particular, our model stresses the nonlinear relationship between task execution time and processor speed for GPU-accelerated applications, for more accurately capturing real-world GPU energy consumption.