A Power-Saving Strategy for Grids

In light of recently stirred energy consumption concerns, we investigate the opportunities for power consumption reduction in Grids. Considering real life Grid traces, we note considerable fluctuations in load. We consider a peak load dimensioning strategy to derive how much servers to install in computational Grids. In lower loaded periods, there is a potential to save energy by dynamically powering on/off servers to address the actual demand for computational capacity. An appropriate scheduling and power-saving scheme can, under such lower-load conditions, considerably reduce energy consumption. The price paid is that some jobs are executed at sites more remote than closer powered-down ones. Yet, the resulting penalty in consumed bandwidth is rather limited and is expected not to cancel the power consumption advantage.