Issue No. 06 - June (2013 vol. 24)
ISSN: 1045-9219
pp: 1161-1171
Minghua Chen , The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Tan Lu , The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Lachlan L.H. Andrew , Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn
ABSTRACT
Energy consumption represents a significant cost in data center operation. A large fraction of the energy, however, is used to power idle servers when the workload is low. Dynamic provisioning techniques aim at saving this portion of the energy, by turning off unnecessary servers. In this paper, we explore how much gain knowing future workload information can bring to dynamic provisioning. In particular, we develop online dynamic provisioning solutions with and without future workload information available. We first reveal an elegant structure of the offline dynamic provisioning problem, which allows us to characterize the optimal solution in a &#x201C;divide-and-conquer&#x201D; manner. We then exploit this insight to design two online algorithms with competitive ratios $(2-\alpha)$ and $(e/(e-1+\alpha ))$, respectively, where $(0\le \alpha \le 1)$ is the normalized size of a look-ahead window in which future workload information is available. A fundamental observation is that future workload information beyond the full-size look-ahead window (corresponding to $(\alpha =1)$) will not improve dynamic provisioning performance. Our algorithms are decentralized and easy to implement. We demonstrate their effectiveness in simulations using real-world traces.
INDEX TERMS
Servers, Algorithm design and analysis, Heuristic algorithms, Computational modeling, Energy consumption, Turning, Cloud computing, online algorithms, Cloud computing, data center, energy efficiency, dynamic provisioning
CITATION
Minghua Chen, Tan Lu, Lachlan L.H. Andrew, "Simple and Effective Dynamic Provisioning for Power-Proportional Data Centers", IEEE Transactions on Parallel & Distributed Systems, vol. 24, no. , pp. 1161-1171, June 2013, doi:10.1109/TPDS.2012.241