Energy-Aware Workflow Execution: An Overview of Techniques for Saving Energy and Emissions in Scientific Compute Clusters

Abstract

Scientific research in many fields routinely requires the analysis of large datasets, and scientists often employ workflow systems to leverage clusters of computers for their data analysis. However, due to their size and scale, these workflow applications can have a considerable environmental footprint in terms of compute resource use, energy consumption, and carbon emissions. Mitigating this is critical in light of climate change and the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions. In this chapter, we exemplify the problem by estimating the carbon footprint of three real-world scientific workflows from different scientific domains. We then describe techniques for reducing the energy consumption and, thereby, carbon footprint of individual workflow tasks and entire workflow applications, such as using energy-efficient heterogeneous architectures, generating optimised code, scaling processor voltages and frequencies, consolidating workloads on shared cluster nodes, and scheduling workloads for optimised energy efficiency.