Data Center Participation in Demand Response Programs with Quality-of-Service Guarantees

Abstract

Demand response helps stabilize the power grid and offers opportunities for consumers to reduce their cost by regulating their power consumption to follow market requirements. Regulation service reserves (RSRs) is a specific form of a demand response program, requiring participants to regulate their power to follow a dynamically-changing target that is updated every few seconds. In return, participants' electricity bill is reduced in proportion to the reserves they provide. Data centers are significant power consumers, and they are good candidates to participate in RSRs because they have the flexibility to regulate their power consumption through various strategies. Previous work in this area has proposed power regulation policies that enable data centers to participate in RSRs, but without providing guarantees on the Quality-of-Service (QoS) of the jobs running on the data center. This paper develops a strategy for a data center to provide RSR while offering QoS guarantees, expressed in terms of the sojourn time of jobs. The proposed policy regulates data center power through power capping and job scheduling, following the spirit of a Generalized Processor Sharing (GPS) policy. Parameters in our policy are calculated so as to minimize the electricity cost under QoS constraints. The key in guaranteeing QoS is to determine an acceptable range for policy parameters using a queueing theoretic result for delay. We evaluate our policy in both large-scale simulations as well as real-system experiments on a small cluster. We demonstrate that our policy enables data centers to participate in RSRs and reduces their electricity bill by 14-51% while providing guarantees on the QoS of the jobs.