Scheduling Variable Capacity Resources for Sustainability

This book is the first to provide an overview of variable capacity scheduling and how it helps balance the growth of computing with its increasing environmental impact by creating more resilient and efficient systems that adapt to the dynamic nature of resource availability, optimizing utilization and minimizing disruptions.

The book covers all aspects of variable capacity scheduling from a technical and a societal perspective. It considers the new age of renewable power generation and how computing services can contribute to sustainability and grid decarbonization. Contributors investigate techniques that can be deployed for schedulers to cope with, or even benefit from, changes in the number of computing resources and the nature of the power sources. They survey emerging computing devices, such as edge servers, as alternatives to classical cloud computing platforms; they identify applications for monitoring energy and regulating power; and they investigate energy minimization and risk-aware scheduling in real-time systems, asking: ‘How can a server with a variable processing speed schedule jobs with hard deadlines while minimizing its energy consumption?’ The authors address the societal impact of computing, exploring how the social sciences play a critical role in solving the computing sustainability challenge and including a holistic analysis of current and future approaches, taking the whole life-cycle and rebound effects into account.

Presenting all the corresponding challenges and opportunities of variable capacity scheduling, this is an excellent introduction to the topic for students, researchers, computing scientists, or concerned citizens interested in sustainability.

Anne Benoit is Full Professor in the Computer Science Laboratory LIP at ENS Lyon, France, and a Senior Member of Institut Universitaire de France. She is the Editor in Chief of Parco, and she has been Associate Editor in Chief of JPDC and Parco. She was the Chair of the IEEE CS TCPP (2020–2024), and she has chaired the program committee of several major conferences in her field, in particular SC, IPDPS, ICPP and HiPC. Her research interests include algorithm design and scheduling techniques for parallel and distributed platforms, with a focus on energy awareness and resilience.

Andrew A. Chien is the William Eckhardt Professor at the University of Chicago and a Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and in prior roles has served at Intel Vice President of Research and Professor at UCSD and University of Illinois. Dr. Chien is a global research leader for sustainable computing, datacenters and power grids, parallel computing, computer architecture, clusters, resource scheduling, and cloud computing, and has received numerous awards for his research. Dr. Chien is an ACM, IEEE, and AAAS Fellow, and earned his PhD, MS, and BS from M.I.T.

Yves Robert is Full Professor in the Computer Science Laboratory LIP at ENS Lyon, France. He is the author of 7 books, 170 journal papers and 250 conference papers. He is the editor of 11 book proceedings and 13 journal special issues. He is the advisor of 38 PhD students. His main research interests are scheduling techniques and resilient algorithms for large-scale platforms. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He has been awarded the 2014 IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing, the 2016 IEEE TCPP Outstanding Service Award, and the 2020 IEEE CS Charles Babbage Award.