Power-aware scheduling of virtual machines in DVFS-enabled clusters

With the advent of Cloud computing, large-scale virtualized compute and data centers are becoming common in the computing industry. These distributed systems leverage commodity server hardware in mass quantity, similar in theory to many of the fastest Supercomputers in existence today. However these systems can consume a cities worth of power just to run idle, and require equally massive cooling systems to keep the servers within normal operating temperatures. This produces CO₂ emissions and significantly contributes to the growing environmental issue of Global Warming. Green computing, a new trend for high-end computing, attempts to alleviate this problem by delivering both high performance and reduced power consumption, effectively maximizing total system efficiency. This paper focuses on scheduling virtual machines in a compute cluster to reduce power consumption via the technique of Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS). Specifically, we present the design and implementation of an efficient scheduling algorithm to allocate virtual machines in a DVFS-enabled cluster by dynamically scaling the supplied voltages. The algorithm is studied via simulation and implementation in a multi-core cluster. Test results and performance discussion justify the design and implementation of the scheduling algorithm.