An Economical Power Management for High Performance Computers

The large amount of energy consumption of high performance computers represent significant financial cost. If we consider the specific situation of electricity price, a measure which makes the energy consumption the lowest is usually not the best on economy. This paper proposes an economical approach for designing a power management plan that reduces the assessment of energy consumption of high performance computers. By taking account of the electricity price in different periods during the day, we assign the workload to each period properly to make the electricity fee as low as possible. A simulation of the cases of a single task and multi-task demonstrates how our approach can be used. The results of the simulation show that our approach can save the electricity fee produced by high performance computers effectively. In the single task case, the proposed approach saves the electricity fee of 10.08% on average, and in the multi-task case the proportion of saved fee is 12.67%.