Reducing the energy consumption of data centers is critical to meeting international climate goals and lowering operation costs. Container orchestration platforms can help counteract this trend by optimally placing applications across the infrastructure to increase resource utilization and reduce energy consumption. But platforms in use today are still energy-agnostic and do not offer any insights into energy consumption. In this paper, we present a monitoring framework and a new modeling approach for resource usage in data centers. The model captures heterogeneous hardware and software and acts as input for a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to predict power consumption. Based on this model, we derive a set of container scheduling algorithms that opportunistically schedule applications based on the estimated energy impact of incoming containers. Our results show that the GNN-based prediction model is very accurate and achieves an average RMSE (Root Mean Square Error) of 7.5%. We have implemented a custom scheduler to demonstrate the benefits of using our prediction, and our scheduler can decrease energy consumption on average by 6.2% without any code changes for the application and without increasing workload completion time compared to the default Kubernetes scheduler.

Summary Since the dawn of quantum computing (QC), theoretical developments like Shor's algorithm proved the conceptual superiority of QC over traditional computing. However, such quantum supremacy claims are difficult to achieve in practice because of the technical challenges of realizing noiseless qubits. In the near future, QC applications will need to rely on noisy quantum devices that offload part of their work to classical devices. One way to achieve this is by using parameterized quantum circuits in optimization or even in machine learning tasks. The energy requirements of quantum algorithms have not yet been studied extensively. In this article, we explore several optimization algorithms using both theoretical insights and numerical experiments to understand their impact on energy consumption. Specifically, we highlight why and how algorithms like quantum natural gradient descent, simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximations or circuit learning methods, are at least to more energy efficient than their classical counterparts; why feedback‐based quantum optimization is energy‐inefficient; and how techniques like Rosalin can improve the energy efficiency of other algorithms by a factor of 20. Finally, we use the NchooseK high‐level programming model to run optimization problems on both gate‐based quantum computers and quantum annealers. Empirical data indicate that these optimization problems run faster, have better success rates, and consume less energy on quantum annealers than on their gate‐based counterparts.

The growing convergence of high-performance, data analytics, and machine-learning applications is increasingly pushing computing systems toward heterogeneous processors and specialized hardware accelerators. Hardware heterogeneity, in turn, leads to finer-grained workflows. State-of-the-art server-less computing resource managers do not currently provide efficient scheduling of such fine-grained tasks on systems with heterogeneous CPUs and specialized hardware accelerators (e.g., GPUs and FPGAs). Working with fine-grained tasks presents an opportunity for more efficient energy use via new scheduling models. Our proposed scheduler enables technologies like Nvidia's Multi-Process Service (MPS) to pack multiple fine-grained tasks on GPUs efficiently. Its advantages include better co-location of jobs and better sharing of hardware resources such as GPUs that were not previously possible on container orchestration systems. We propose a Kubernetes-native energy-aware scheduler that integrates with our heterogeneous framework. Combining fine-grained resource scheduling on heterogeneous hardware and energy-aware scheduling results in up to 17.6% improvement in makespan, up to 20.16% reduction in energy consumption for CPU workloads, and up to 58.15% improvement in makespan, and up to 28.92% reduction in energy consumption for GPU workloads.

With the slowing of Moore's law and decline of Dennard scaling, computing systems increasingly rely on specialized hardware accelerators in addition to general-purpose compute units. Increased hardware heterogeneity necessitates disaggregating applications into workflows of fine-grained tasks that run on a diverse set of CPUs and accelerators. Current accelerator delivery models cannot support such applications efficiently, as (1) the overhead of managing accelerators erases performance benefits for fine-grained tasks; (2) exclusive accelerator use per task leads to underutilization; and (3) specialization increases complexity for developers.

Cloud platforms typically require users to provide resource requirements for applications so that resource managers can schedule containers with adequate allocations. However, the requirements for container resources often depend on numerous factors such as application input parameters, optimization flags, input files, and attributes that are specified for each run. So, it is complex for users to estimate the resource requirements for a given container accurately, leading to resource over-estimation that negatively affects overall utilization. We have designed a Resource Utilization Based Autoscaling System (RUBAS) that can dynamically adjust the allocation of containers running in a Kubernetes cluster. RUBAS improves upon the Kubernetes Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) system non-disruptively by incorporating container migration. Our experiments use multiple scientific benchmarks. We analyze the allocation pattern of RUBAS with Kubernetes VPA. We compare the performance of container migration for in-place and remote node migration and we evaluate the overhead in RUBAS. Our results show that compared to Kubernetes VPA, RUBAS improves the CPU and memory utilization of the cluster by 10% and reduces the runtime by 15% with an overhead for each application ranging from 5% to 20%.

Academic cloud infrastructures require users to specify an estimate of their resource requirements. The resource usage for applications often depends on the input file sizes, parameters, optimization flags, and attributes, specified for each run. Incorrect estimation can result in low resource utilization of the entire infrastructure and long wait times for jobs in the queue. We have designed a Resource Utilization based Migration (RUMIG) system to address the resource estimation problem. We present the overall architecture of the two-stage elastic cluster design, the Apache Mesos-specific container migration system, and analyze the performance for several scientific workloads on three different cloud/cluster environments. In this paper we (b) present a design and implementation for container migration in a Mesos environment, (c) evaluate the effect of right-sizing and cluster elasticity on overall performance, (d) analyze different profiling intervals to determine the best fit, (e) determine the overhead of our profiling mechanism. Compared to the default use of Apache Mesos, in the best cases, RUMIG provides a gain of 65% in runtime (local cluster), 51% in CPU utilization in the Chameleon cloud, and 27% in memory utilization in the Jetstream cloud.

Cloud infrastructures increasingly include a heterogeneous mix of components in terms of performance, power, and energy usage. As the size of cloud infrastructures grows, power consumption becomes a significant constraint. We use Apache Mesos and Apache Aurora, which provide massive scalability to Web-scale applications, to demonstrate how a policy driven approach involving bin-packing workloads according to their power profiles, instead of the default allocation by Mesos and Aurora, can effectively reduce the peak-power and energy usage as well as the node utilization, when workloads are co-scheduled. Our experimental results show reductions of 11% in peak power, 86% for total energy usage, and an increase in utilization of 148% for memory and 8% CPU for the different policies.