An online electricity cost budgeting algorithm for maximizing green energy usage across data centers

Abstract

With the sky-rocketing development of Internet services, the power usage in data centers has been significantly increasing. This ever increasing energy consumption leads to negative environmental impact such as global warming. To reduce their carbon footprints, large Internet service operators begin to utilize green energy. Since green energy is currently more expensive than the traditional brown one, it is important for the operators to maximize the green energy usage subject to their desired long-term (e.g., a month) cost budget constraint. In this paper, we propose an online algorithm GreenBudget based on the Lyapunov optimization framework. We prove that our algorithm is able to achieve a delicate tradeoff between the green energy usage and the enforcement of the cost budget constraint, and a control parameter V is the knob to arbitrarily tune such a tradeoff. We evaluate GreenBudget utilizing real-life traces of user requests, cooling efficiency, electricity price and green energy availability. Experimental results demonstrate that under the same cost budget constraint, GreenBudget can increase the green energy usage by 11.55% compared with the state-of-the-art work, without incurring any performance violation of user requests.