On Time-Sensitive Revenue Management and Energy Scheduling in Green Data Centers

Abstract: In this paper, we design an analytically and experimentally better online energy and job scheduling algorithm with the objective of maximizing net profit for a service provider in green data centers. We first study the previously known algorithms and conclude that these online algorithms have provable poor performance against their worst-case scenarios. To guarantee an online algorithm's performance in hindsight, we design a randomized algorithm to schedule energy and jobs in the data centers and prove the algorithm's expected competitive ratio in various settings. Our algorithm is theoretical-sound and it outperforms the previously known algorithms in many settings using both real traces and simulated data. An optimal offline algorithm is also implemented as an empirical benchmark.