SEED: solar energy‐aware efficient scheduling for data centers

Abstract

SUMMARYIt is well known that data centers are consuming a large amount of energy that incurs significant financial and environmental costs. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in utilizing green energy for data centers, where green energy sources include solar and wind. This paper studies the crucial problem of maximizing the utilization of green energy through scheduling complex jobs in data centers in order to reduce the use of traditional brown energy. However, it is highly challenging for data centers to make use of green energy. First, the availability of typical green energy is variable to dynamic changes of natural environments, for example, weather. Second, although predictions can be made for the future availability of green energy, it is inevitable that such predictions have errors. Third, jobs are associated with strict deadlines, and it is required that jobs are completed before their deadlines. Finally, because the reliability in a data center relies upon temperature, the awareness of temperature should be taken into account while maximizing the green energy. In this paper, we consider online scheduling of jobs whose arrivals to the data center system dynamically. In addition, we explicitly take the power consumption of switches into account when scheduling jobs onto computing nodes. Two solar energy‐aware algorithms called SEEDMin and SEEDMax have been proposed. Then, we extend SEED to RSEED with the awareness of reliability. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, comprehensive simulations have been conducted, and the proposed algorithms are compared with other state‐of‐art algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that both SEEDMin and SEEDMax can significantly increase the utilization of solar energy without violating job deadlines and overall energy budget. The amount of solar energy utilized by SEEDMin and SEEDMax is 33.4%and35.3% larger than that of two traditional scheduling algorithms, MinMin and MinMax, respectively. Also, it can be seen that RSEED greatly improves the reliability by decreasing the temperature. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.