Large-scale Distributed Systems and Energy Efficiency: A Holistic View

Chapter 8Scheduling and Resource Allocation

Pragati Agrawal,¹ Damien Borgetto,² Carmela Comito,³ Georges Da Costa,² Jean-Marc Pierson,² Payal Prakash,¹ Shrisha Rao,¹ Domenico Talia,⁴ Cheikhou Thiam,² and Paolo Trunfio⁴

¹IIIT Bangalore, Bangalore, India

²IRIT, University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France

³ICAR, CNR, Rende, Italy

⁴DIMES, Università della Calabria, Rende, Italy

8.1 Introduction: Energy-Aware Scheduling

Scheduling is of course a well-known topic, having received extensive attention from practitioners as well as theoreticians. It is an important issue in operations research, as being of great importance in the management and operation of large chemical process systems, airlines, manufacturing equipment on a factory floor, etc. It is also studied by computer scientists, particularly in the context of chip-level processes and threads.

Almost all the work to date in scheduling has been concerned with reducing the makespan, that is, the time taken for a schedule of tasks to be completed (under given constraints). However, it is realized recently that reducing the energy consumed in completing a schedule is, in many contexts, a goal at least as worthy, and that time-minimal schedules need not be energy-minimal, so that energy-aware (EA) scheduling is a topic of study in its own right. With energy shortages, and rising costs of energy, and other resources becoming a perennial reality across the globe, there is little doubt that scheduling and operations of systems at all ...