DiBA: Distributed Power Budget Allocation for Large-Scale Computing Clusters

Abstract

Power management has become a central issue inlarge-scale computing clusters where a considerable amount ofenergy is consumed and a large operational cost is incurredannually. Traditional power management techniques have a centralizeddesign that creates challenges for scalability of computingclusters. In this work, we develop a framework for distributedpower budget allocation that maximizes the utility of computingnodes subject to a total power budget constraint. To eliminate the role of central coordinator in the primaldualtechnique, we propose a distributed power budget allocationalgorithm (DiBA) which maximizes the combined performanceof a cluster subject to a power budget constraint in a distributedfashion. Specifically, DiBA is a consensus-based algorithm inwhich each server determines its optimal power consumptionlocally by communicating its state with neighbors (connectednodes) in a cluster. We characterize a synchronous primal-dualtechnique to obtain a benchmark for comparison with thedistributed algorithm that we propose. We demonstrate numericallythat DiBA is a scalable algorithm that outperforms theconventional primal-dual method on large scale clusters in termsof convergence time. Further, DiBA eliminates the communicationbottleneck in the primal-dual method. We thoroughly evaluatethe characteristics of DiBA through simulations of large-scaleclusters. Furthermore, we provide results from a proof-of-conceptimplementation on a real experimental cluster.