1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for power management for clusters of computers.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Powerful computing systems today are often formed by linking a group of computers into a cluster. Clusters can improve performance and availability relative to a single computer. Clusters also allow data processing operations to be load balanced among the computers in the cluster. For clusters that include a large number of linked computers, the cluster consumes large amounts of power. Such clusters, however, in prior art must be designed for worst case data processing loads, which means that at any given time there will be wasted power output from computers in such clusters that are not working at their most efficient levels. Also, to the extent that computers are available for inclusion in a cluster that are more efficient at particular data processing loads, there is no way in the prior art to take such efficiencies into consideration in configuring the computers to include in the cluster.