IBM Spectrum LSF energy aware scheduling

LSF offers energy-aware scheduling features for large scale LSF installations, where the energy requirements for operating large systems are becoming a significant factor in the overall cost of these systems. On large systems with either a long lead period to full production or widely fluctuating workloads, many nodes can sit idle for significant time periods. The energy-aware scheduling features of LSF enable administrators to control the processor frequency to allow some applications to run at a decreased frequency with minor performance degradation. Decreasing the frequency can lead to overall power savings. Conversely, minimizing the frequency on unused cores can also enable maximum turbo boost to active cores, to increase application performance, and to reduce run times. Frequency control allows an organization to balance performance with power savings. It should be noted that for resizable jobs, bjobs can only get the energy cost of the latest resizable job's executive hosts.

LSF energy-aware scheduling includes the following features:

• Host-based policies to manage the power state of hosts.
• Ability to set the CPU frequency at the job, application, or queue level.
• Collection and reporting of power usage for an application (assuming exclusive use of nodes).
• Benchmarking application power usage and generation of relevant power coefficients.
• Prediction of performance, power usage, and runtime of applications at different CPU frequencies.
• Automatic CPU frequency selection for jobs based on predictions.