Energy and thermal models for simulation of workload and resource management in computing systems

Abstract

In the recent years, we have faced the evolution of high-performance computing (HPC) systems towards higher scale, density and heterogeneity. In particular, hardware vendors along with software providers, HPC centers, and scientists are struggling with the exascale computing challenge. As the density of both computing power and heat is growing, proper energy and thermal management becomes crucial in terms of overall system efficiency. Moreover, an accurate and relatively fast method to evaluate such large scale computing systems is needed. In this paper we present a way to model energy and thermal behavior of computing system. The proposed model can be used to effectively estimate system performance, energy consumption, and energy-efficiency metrics. We evaluate their accuracy by comparing the values calculated based on these models against the measurements obtained on real hardware. Finally, we show how the proposed models can be applied to workload scheduling and resource management in large scale computing systems by integrating them in the DCworms simulation framework.