Exploring the Difference of Power-Aware Cluster Schedulers

Energy efficiency has become one of the most important challenges in designing large-scale clusters due to the commercialized computer components. Traditionally, load balancers are employed by clusters to improve system performance and scalability. However, those balancers do not consider the energy used by the clusters. A power-aware cluster scheduler has been proposed in the community by concentrating the workloads to a few nodes, and turning off those nodes which do not have workloads. By augmenting the traditional cluster schedulers with power management, this paper explores the impacts of power management on the different cluster schedulers. Real traces are used to evaluate the impacts. Though the cluster schedulers are significantly different, from a power standpoint, we only observed slight difference of different cluster schedulers.