GreenSlot: Scheduling Energy Consumption in Green Datacenters

In this paper, the authors propose GreenSlot, a parallel batch job scheduler for a datacenter powered by a photovoltaic solar array and the electrical grid (as a backup). GreenSlot predicts the amount of solar energy that will be available in the near future, and schedules the workload to maximize the green energy consumption while meeting the jobs' deadlines. If brown energy must be used to avoid deadline violations, the scheduler selects times when brown electricity is cheap. The results for production scientific workloads demonstrate that GreenSlot can increase green energy consumption by up to 117% and decrease energy cost by up to 39%, compared to EASY backfilling.