Incentives for dynamic and energy-aware capacity allocation for multi-tenant clusters

Abstract

Large scale clusters are now being used in shared, multi-tenant scenarios by heterogeneous applications with completely different requirements. In this scenario, it's useful to explore the intersection of two complementary goals. On one side, energy efficiency is an important factor to consider in this world with increasing operating costs related to energy consumption. On the other side, heterogeneous applications emphasize the problem of distributing the execution capacity among competitive users in a shared setting. In this paper, we address the combination of these two goals by introducing an incentive mechanism to make users report their actual resource requirements, allowing them to dynamically scale-up or down as necessary. In turn, this information is used by the infrastructure operator to shut down resources without reducing the QoS provided to users and effectively reducing energy costs. We show how our mechanism is able to meet the performance requirements of applications without over-provisioning physical resources, which in turn translates into energy savings. © 2013 Springer International Publishing.