Power aware job scheduling with QoS guarantees based on feedback control

With the scale of computing system increases, power consumption has become the major challenge to system performance, reliability and IT management costs. Specifically, system performance and reliability, described by various Quality of Service(QoS) metrics, cannot be guaranteed if the objective is to minimize the total power consumption solely, despite of the violations of QoS. Various methods have been developed to control power consumption to avoid system failures and thermal emergencies through coarse-grained designs. However, the existing methods can be improved and more power can be saved if fine-grained job level adaptation is integrated into them. In this paper a feedback control based power aware job scheduling algorithm is proposed to minimize power consumption in computing system and to provide QoS guarantees. In the proposed algorithm, jobs are scheduled according to the realtime and historical power consumption as well as the QoS requirements. Simulations and experiments on real multi core computing system show that the power potential of the system can be deeply explored while still providing QoS guarantees and the performance degradation is acceptable. The experiment results also show that fine-grained job-level power aware scheduling can achieve better power/performance balancing between multiple processors or cores than coarse-grained methods.