Energy-aware accounting and billing in large-scale computing facilities

Proposals have focused on reducing energy requirements for large-scale computing facilities (LSCFs), but little research has addressed the need for energy-usage-based accounting. Energy-aware accounting and billing benefits LSCF owners and users. This article makes a case for accurate cost accounting and billing, which accounts for user-specific energy usage, and identifies the hardware- and software-level changes necessary to support energy-aware accounting. © 2011 IEEE.This work was supported by a collaboration agreement between IBM and BSC with funds from IBM Research and IBM Deep Computing. It was also supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Spain under contracts TIN-2007-60625 and JCI-2008-3688, as well as the HiPEAC Network of Excellence (ICT-217068).Peer Reviewe