At our site, we need a scheduler, which is power-aware, and will power-down/power-up nodes to save energy. AFAIK, PBSpro should be able to do this, see eg.:
Apparently, it is also known as “Green Provisioning”. The page refers to “talk to your Altair representative about deploying Green Provisioning at your site”, as this is a “Limited Availability feature with PBS Professional”. However, with the new “Free and Open Source Software” (FOSS) approach taken by Altair for PBSpro (thanks a lot!), I trust that this feature is available within the open-source framework.
I have searched the guides (for PBSpro v13), but I do not find any mentioning of “green provisioning” or “green computing” in the Admin, Reference, Install or Quick Start guides.
Can anybody please point me in a direction to some sort of info/doc on how I can set up green computing / provisioning?
This is a critical/show stopper feature for us.
I contacted Altair at the booth (and talks) at the ISC (and HPCAST) conference in Frankfurt in June, and I got the clear impression that this feature would be part of the open source package. Hopefully, I have just missed the right chapter/section and/or home page / reference to how to use this feature.
I hope somebody can point me in the right direction!
Our intention is to release the Green Provisioning capabilities as part of PBS Pro (as FOSS), hopefully in the next major release.
As you can imagine, it took a lot of engineering effort to transform a long-time commercial product (PBS Pro 13.1) into a FOSS-friendly, community-friendly solution (PBS Pro 14.1). As part of this effort, we prioritized getting the core of PBS Pro out as soon as possible, with other capabilities to be released later. Green Provisioning / Power Management was one of the capabilities that did not make the first release.
If you don’t want to wait, you can get in touch with the commercial support team at Altair (via pbssales@altair.com) – they can certainly help get you up and going right away.
If you’re wiling to work on integrating the PBS Pro 13.1 Green Provisioning capabilities into PBS Pro 15.x, and contributing that work back to the community, let me know. We’d love to get it done sooner (rather than later) with community help.
Thanks again for all the great activity and questions on the forum.
This is pretty bad for us. Green computing is a must-have for us at this time, and we must settle on a scheduler presently. I recall getting a very clear “yes” on a direct question regarding Green at the Altair booth at ISC/Frankfurt. I was not told that it might come later. If that had been raised, then we would not even have bothered with PbsPro, but have used all our efforts with SLURM. Although I very much appreciated your initiative, we still may be forced down that road now.
Yes, I am fully aware of that.
Do you have a rough idea of when the “next major release” will happen? (Presumably, this is 2017Q2 as per the roadmap). And a guestimate of the likelihood that Green Provisioning will make the cut? I do not see it at all on the roadmap https://pbspro.atlassian.net/wiki/display/PBSPro/PBS+Pro+Roadmap
I am not exactly sure what you are proposing. I already contacted pbssales@, but as do not have the option to buy a commercial license (to 13.1?), then how can they help me with this if the feature is not available in the present code?
Unfortunately, that is probably not really an option for me presently. I try to feed back my findings and evaluations as well as I can, but as everybody I have an unbound set of tasks on my desk already (not to mention kids at home). I would like more info before making the decision, though.
Just for completeness.
In another thread, Bill pointed at a list of differences between 13.1 and 14.1
but I do not see Green Provisioning on that list. (And as mentioned above it is not on the roadmap either). Presumably, it should be on both lists according to the answer above.
First, apologies for any miscommunication at ISC. The reality is that our open source initiative is really new territory for us, and not everything was nailed down (and well understood) at launch at ISC. In talking with the Altair European team, I think they may have a solution that will get you everything you need. It’s not perfect, but hopefully will work well for your case.
The longer answer is that the current state of Green Provisioning (energy-aware scheduling) within PBS Pro is complicated… There are three separate packages implementing 5 different capabilities (and not all capabilities are supported equally by all packages). We plan to merge and release everything as open source, and that’s what will take some time and effort.
The 5 high-level Green Provisioning capabilities are:
(1) powering nodes off/on,
(2) monitoring power/energy,
(3) per-job power profiles,
(4) energy accounting, and
(5) power capping.
Depending on which capabilities you require, the Altair European team should be able to work with you to get you some type of “early access” to the pre-Open Source version(s). For the official open source release, we need to be more deliberate to make the design/architecture fit (and address any legal issues on our side).
Finally, thanks for pointing out the missing info on the Doc and Roadmap pages; we’ll work on updating those.
I understand that it is the intention to include Green Provisioning in the “next major release” (15.x in 2017 Q1 - Q2).
Would it be possible to actually put it on the roadmap page, to inform existing and future PbsPro users about it:
I would like to reopen this topic. Especially these days (given the current energy prices), we would definitely appreciate energy-aware scheduling.
As far as I know, the features mentioned in this topic have not been released as open source. Is there any chance it could happen in the future? …or could you just share some ideas behind it?
We already have some ideas. Not sure how feasible they are. Basically, we could add some custom invisible node resources representing e.g. power consumption. We also have an idea to account for energy-related resources in the fairshare formula.