Implementation and Evaluation of a Thermal-Aware Campus Grid

Volunteer and grid computing framework systems have helped create several of today’s largest resource pools for scientific and engineering computing. At the same time, as computers evolve, there is a greater demand for more environmental-aware scheduling systems to be deployed with these frameworks in order to address existing concerns of the preservation of resources like energy, and computers themselves. In response to this concern, the High Performance Computing Services Center of Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (HPC-UTP) sought to incorporate thermal-aware scheduling into its campus grid. To achieve this, the center decided to modify an existing Volunteer Computing (VC) framework to make use of different schedulers at run time, without the need to recompile the server. This thermal-aware, dynamic-scheduling capable framework will be deployed on a test environment, to assess its viability for the university’s campus grid.