Reducing power consumption is quickly becoming a first-class optimization metric for many high-performance parallel computing
platforms. One of the techniques employed by many prior proposals along this direction is voltage scaling and past research
used it on different components such as networks, CPUs, and memories. In contrast to most of the existent efforts on voltage
scaling that target a single component (CPU, network or memory components), this paper proposes and experimentally evaluates
a voltage/frequency scaling algorithm that considers CPU and communication links in a mesh network at the same time. More
specifically, it scales voltages/frequencies of CPUs in the nodes and the communication links among them in a coordinated
fashion (instead of one after another) such that energy savings are maximized without impacting execution time. Our experiments
with several tree-based sparse matrix computations reveal that the proposed integrated voltage scaling approach is very effective
in practice and brings 13% and 17% energy savings over the pure CPU and pure communication link voltage scaling schemes, respectively.
The results also show that our savings are consistent with the different network sizes and different sets of voltage/frequency
levels.
Keywords Energy consumption - Dynamic voltage scaling - Parallel sparse matrix - Computation - Communication networks