Maximizing Performance and Energy Efficiency of a Real-Time Heterogeneous 2-Level Grid System Using DVS

Power consumption in large scale systems has been studied severely. Reasons are mainly environmental-ecological and economical. This paper studies the application of power saving mechanisms combined with scheduling policies in a real-time 2-level heterogeneous grid system. We propose power saving mechanisms taking advantage of Dynamic Voltage Scaling of modern processors. A simulation model is used to evaluate performance of these policies at the grid level and at the local level and to measure the energy saved by the application of power-saving mechanisms at the processor level. Our experimental results show 15% to 35% savings in processors´ power consumption when the power saving mechanism is applied, while performance of the system is maintained at satisfactory levels.