Renewable and cooling aware workload management for sustainable data centers

Abstract

The demand for data center computing increased significantly in recent years resulting in huge energy consumption. Data centers typically comprise three main subsystems: IT equipment provides services to customers; power infrastructure supports the IT and cooling equipment; and the cooling infrastructure removes the generated heat. This work presents a novel approach to model the energy flows in a data center and optimize its holistic operation. Traditionally, supply-side constraints such as energy or cooling availability were largely treated independently from IT workload management. This work reduces cost and environmental impact using a holistic approach that integrates energy supply, e.g., renewable supply and dynamic pricing, and cooling supply, e.g., chiller and outside air cooling, with IT workload planning to improve the overall attainability of data center operations. Specifically, we predict renewable energy as well as IT demand and design an IT workload management plan that schedules IT workload and allocates IT resources within a data center according to time varying power supply and cooling efficiency. We have implemented and evaluated our approach using traces from real data centers and production systems. The results demonstrate that our approach can reduce the recurring power costs and the use of non-renewable energy by as much as 60% compared to existing, non-integrated techniques, while still meeting operational goals and Service Level Agreements.

Carbon-Efficient Virtual Machine Placement Based on Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling in Geo-Distributed Cloud Data Centers

“…To analyze the power consumption of a cooling device, standard computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units are considered in this work. The power consumption of the chiller does not change much with regard to the outside air temperature or IT load [50]. The coefficient of performance (CoP) is the measure used to compute the efficiency of the cooling unit to determine its cooling load.…”

Energy Cost Minimization with Risk Rate Constraint for Internet Data Center in Deregulated Electricity Markets

“…Guo et al (2013) develop an online algorithm to minimize energy cost with batteries, which can utilize the temporal diversity of electricity price. Liu et al (2012) consider server management together with cooling and usage of renewable energy. Then, they investigate the problem of minimizing the long-term energy cost with the uncertainties in electricity price, workload, renewable energy generation, and power outage state (Liu et al, 2015).…”

Data Centers as Active Multi-Energy Systems for Power Grid Decarbonization: A Technical and Economic Analysis

“…The possibility of operating DCs as active MES has captured the attention of many researchers in the last few years. The concept to plan DCs according to the "net-zero-energy" approach has been formulated in [10,11]. In both cases, the DC's thermal loads have been considered as a flexibility option to match the DC´s load, according to the electric power generated by volatile RES.…”