Just in time dynamic voltage scaling: Exploiting inter-node slack to save energy in MPI programs

Recently, improving the energy efficiency of HPC machines has become important. As a result, interest in using power-scalable clusters, where frequency and voltage can be dynamically modified, has increased. On power-scalable clusters, one opportunity for saving energy with little or no loss of performance exists when the computational load is not perfectly balanced. This situation occurs frequently, as balancing load between nodes is one of the long standing problems in parallel and distributed computing. In this paper we present a system called Jitter, which reduces the frequency on nodes that are assigned less computation and therefore have slack time. This saves energy on these nodes, and the goal of Jitter is to attempt to ensure that they arrive “just in time” so that they avoid increasing overall execution time. For example, in Aztec, from the ASCI Purple suite, our algorithm uses 8% less energy while increasing execution time by only 2.6%.