Linearized Data Center Workload and Cooling Management

Abstract: With the current high levels of energy consumption of data centers, reducing power consumption by even a small percentage is beneficial. We propose a framework for thermal-aware workload distribution in a data center to reduce cooling power consumption. The framework includes linearization of the general optimization problem and proposing a heuristic to approximate the solution for the resulting Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problems. We first define a general nonlinear power optimization problem including several cooling parameters, heat recirculation effects, and constraints on server temperatures. We propose to study a linearized version of the problem, which is easier to analyze. As an energy saving scenario and as a proof of concept for our approach, we also consider the possibility that the red-line temperature for idle servers is higher than that for busy servers. For the resulting ILP problem, we propose a heuristic for intelligent rounding of the fractional solution. Through numerical simulations, we compare our heuristics with two baseline algorithms. We also evaluate the performance of the solution of the linearized system on the original system. The results show that the proposed approach can reduce the cooling power consumption by more than 30 percent compared to the case of continuous utilizations and a single red-line temperature.