PMaC's green queue: a framework for selecting energy optimal DVFS configurations in large scale MPI applications

This article presents Green Queue, a production quality tracing and analysis framework for implementing application aware Dynamic Voltage-Frequency Scaling (DVFS) for MPI applications in high performance computing (HPC). Green Queue makes use of both intertask and intratask DVFS techniques. The intertask technique targets applications where the workload is imbalanced by reducing CPU clock frequency and therefore power draw for ranks with lighter workloads. The intratask technique targets balanced workloads where all tasks are synchronously running the same code. The strategy identifies program phases and selects the energy-optimal frequency for each by predicting power and measuring the performance responses of each phase to frequency changes. The success of these techniques is evaluated on 1024 cores on Gordon, a supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center built using Intel Xeon E5-2670 (Sandybridge) processors. Green Queue achieves up to 21% and 32% energy savings for the intratask and intertask DVFS strategies respectively. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.