Renewable and cooling aware workload management for sustainable data centers

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 t...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Zhenhua Liu, Yuan Chen, Cullen Bash, Adam Wierman, Daniel Gmach, Zhikui Wang, Manish Marwah, Chris Hyser
• Keywords: Energy Consumption Data, Hardware, Service Level Agreements, Side Constraints, SIGMETRICS 2012