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Universität Potsdam

Squirrel

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Despite significant advances in hardware efficiency, data centers continue increasing their electricity consumption due to rising application demand. Consequently, data center carbon emissions grow. In addition to energy-saving mechanisms, increasing progress in carbon-aware software is necessary to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. Enhancing workload managers used in data centers with carbon-aware mechanisms counteracts their emissions. State-of-the-art solutions do not cover carbon-aware scheduling for the widely used workload manager Slurm. This thesis develops and evaluates three carbon-aware scheduling algorithms for high-performance computing clusters using the Slurm scheduler. To this end, we elaborate on whether we can reduce operational emissions using spatiotemporal workload shifting within a Slurm cluster in Germany and how the effects differ across energy zones with different characteristics of their electricity grid. We develop and evaluate Squirrel, a carbon-aware batch job scheduler prototype that considers the grid carbon intensity and servers’ thermal design power values. We also propose a forecasting algorithm for grid carbon intensity that can be used when there is no access to forecasting data. We measure the energy profiles of different TPCx-AI jobs and use their hourly energy consumptions to simulate workload scheduling for three different cluster configurations. Our simulations compare Squirrel with carbon-agnostic first-in-first-out scheduling in five different energy zones. The comparison is based on the hourly computation of schedules using data throughout 2023. Squirrel achieves average emission savings between 0.3% and 32% in our simulations, demonstrating the practical implications of our research.

Degree

thesis:*
Level thesis:degree_level
master
Grantor dc:publisher
Universität Potsdam
Year
2024

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Springer, Luca
Contributors dc:contributor
  • Tolovski, Ilin
  • Rabl, Tilmann
  • Polze, Andreas

Subjects

dc:subject × 11

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • CC-BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:kobv.de-opus4-uni-potsdam:67320

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Universität Potsdam - Thes
Base URL
publishup.uni-potsdam.de/opus4-ubp/oai
Last updated
2026-07-24
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Springer, Luca. Squirrel. master thesis, Universität Potsdam, 2024. https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/67320